Housing Culture
Where does Scotland find new residents for the empty houses of our Gods?
A wonderfully fast and stress-free train whisked me between two events in Edinburgh and Stirling last week, offering time to reflect on how the housing of culture intersects with the culture of housing. Two crises shared, but far from resolved.
The Edinburgh event, organised by Housing Justice and ARK Consultancy, focused on the potential to deliver affordable housing through redundant churches, and is just one of a series of gatherings in response to the cultural emergency in Scotland’s places of former worship. Does the decline of religion provide an opportunity to fix the housing emergency?
On the face of it, the huge reduction in religious practice over the last 50 years offers up a rich portfolio of churches, manses, halls and glebe lands that are available to be put to other uses. Church property is privately owned and now widely available on the open market, as the pressure of insurance and maintenance costs dictate fast-paced, large-scale disposal by the Church of Scotland.
We saw examples of churches imaginatively adapted into housing and others demolished and replaced by new build development. It appears a ready-made solution at the heart of communities across Scotland, we just need to streamline the process and remove outdated planning and building standards constraints.
This makes sense if you treat churches as a commercial property portfolio and the only metric you use is money. But kirk property holds many values beyond financial, which should be measured in our calculations - environmental, social and cultural values that we will miss when they are lost.
A Mission to Steward the Natural World?
Kirk properties are a national reservoir of embodied carbon, of biodiversity and of construction material resources, accrued over hundreds of years. In Scotland, we still don’t have our Just Transition Plan for the Built Environment, but if we did, we would have a metric and a duty to quantify embodied carbon (otherwise known as Scope 3 emissions) and we would value our old buildings as we do our peat bogs and ancient woodlands as shields against climate disaster.
Zero Waste Scotland are currently writing the delivery plan for the Circular Economy Act in construction - the sector that consumes most of our materials and produces most of our waste, in our country that consumes three times its global share of resources. Maybe that Plan will someday create the metrics and duties to measure the resources held within the urban material banks we call buildings, and give us the tools to safeguard rather than squander them.
Nobody mentioned biodiversity net gain. It’s in the new National Planning Framework 4, but even with those duties we lack metrics and practices to make it real. Maybe one day we will see delivery embedded in public policy, not treated as an afterthought.
Holding the Intangible
Culture is another thing held in these places that have been at the heart of our communities’ lives for thousands of years, places that hold the bones of our people and the relics of our past shared lived experiences. (You’ll need to be quick to snap up the 13th century Culross Abbey - a bargain at just £35,000). The Kirk property portfolio holds a huge part of Scotland cultural heritage - built and intangible, ethics, political struggle, genius loci – our sense of place, community memory of trauma, celebration and collective action. These places are a vessel we have built for all these things, held in trust by groups of local people vested in place. And in that, they reflect our diversity and our stories, etched into our place in this troubled world. It is part of our generations challenge to carry all these things safely through to the future, into safe hands as a future inheritance. They are a touchstone to help us guide our nation’s journey.
This is what we call intangible cultural heritage (ICH). The UK only recently signed the UNESCO charter on intangible cultural heritage, and we are now playing catch-up to develop our understanding, systems and models for supporting and sustaining this vital part of our culture. The way Scotland is currently destroying its church heritage is a case in point, written large across our communities and newspapers. If we look, we can learn from other countries that are ahead of us how to manage our ICH better.
A Good Fit For Housing?
Church property is very varied in its quality and significance, and if they are to remain living places, carrying life forward, they must adapt to new circumstances. Adaptive re-use is the architectural game of the next century. But any game needs clear rules and fair play.
We need more affordable housing and some church property may suit this use, but the Housing Associations present said that it was not a viable option, as adaptive re-use generally doesn’t stack up financially at the moment (VAT on retrofit a constant disincentive) and churches tend to have higher costs and significant constraints, like graveyards and services. So when churches are bought and changed to homes, it tends to be by wealthy individuals rather than for community benefit.
So while available, churches are not well-aligned for development supply under current market conditions. This is where the third sector and community-led initiatives should be able to intervene to provide solutions where the public and private sector cannot. Community-led solutions could safeguard local culture, target outcomes to local needs (like keeping older people in place) and build community wealth and resilience. However, this not what the current process enables:
Congregations are consulted, but communities are not
National housing targets crush the granularity of local needs
It’s near impossible for communities to access funding for housing
And time is another commodity in the development game. What D.J. Johnston-Smith of the Scottish Churches Trust described as ‘the fire sale of church property’ simply doesn’t give communities enough time to build viable local re-use strategies.
Eyes on Wales
Not for the first time, the progress being delivered in Wales provides useful precedent for Scotland. Key lessons documented in a relevant recent report include:
· The need to align public policies to deliver shared goals
· The need for flexible implementation of regulation
· An enabling role for a public body to hold temporary ownership
All good lessons for Scotland that could deliver a huge difference in outcomes.
Hope Cohousing, Orkney
Looking Up River
While there was some robustness to the conversation in Edinburgh, up the Forth, the conversation at Stirling University’s conference on ‘Healthy and Sustainable Housing for the Ageing Population’ tiptoed on the edge of groupthink, with a range of cross sector stakeholders agreeing that we have the design solutions to enable thriving in place, but the housing sector as currently constituted is just not fit to deliver it.
Key lessons included:
Healthy, accessible homes must exist in a healthy, accessible environment - social justice is vested in environmental justice.
The homes almost all of us will live in in our order age are already built – we need to focus on retro-fit, but funding and VAT inhibit this
Individuals need communities to thrive – social connection, not just buildings and kit
Sound familiar?
The academic researchers seemed to be getting a little tired of just doing more research to prove the same points, while nobody with agency to deliver acts on their clear advice. Some thought they needed to advocate more clearly.
It felt like conversations I’d been hearing for the last 15 years, as we watched the slow failure of Age, Home & Community, the Scottish Government’s 10-year strategy for Housing Scotland’s Older People, 2012-2021, which promised ‘nothing less than an urgent and sustained programme of reform, focused on improving outcomes through greater integration of public services at a local level, based on principles of localism, partnership and collaborative working’. LOL
Participants noted how they used to get delegations from China and other countries coming to Scotland to see our leading examples of innovative practice, and now nobody comes. We look abroad and sigh.
Let’s Not Completely Forget the Planet is on Fire
In both events, we heard speakers call to relax Net Zero targets in order to build more new homes now. Magdalena Blazusiak of SEDA pointed out the futility of these arguments. Sixty-four thousand homes currently lie empty in Scotland. Four hundred thousand buildings in Scotland will soon be at risk from flooding due to climate change.
Imagine walking down your street and one in seven homes, businesses and community facilities lies under water, can’t get insurance or a mortgage. Stranded assets and ruined lives will be the price of our inability to stop burning fossil fuels. It would be madness to rush to build lots more new homes with high carbon materials, chasing short-term ‘growth’ in a splurge that catastrophically undermines our long-term wellbeing.
We need to safeguard Scotland as a home for future generations, while providing for the needs of our current one. Environmental justice and social justice are twin sisters walking hand in hand towards a progressive future, not binary opposites in competition for declining resources in a zero sum game. You cannot have equity without Nature, the barriers are the same and need to be overcome together if we are to thrive.
A House of Mirrors
Homes are the theatre of our lives, where we pass belonging between generations, where we sort out the things that are important to us and discard those whose time has passed. Homes are the residence of thriving and joyous lives, hope for the future and memories of the past, but they are also places of strife, loneliness and insecurity.
They have been for ten thousand years. That’s why they are such a mirror for our culture, the basecamp of what it is to be Scottish. And that culture is not in a happy place. If we care to look in that mirror, we too often see inequality and exclusion reflected back, short-term financial gain prevailing over long term social outcomes.
In this lens, the two events on the same day came together with the same message – we need to make a better home for our culture and a better culture of our homes. Future generations will thank us for that inheritance.
A Magic Word
Housing is one of those magic words that can be read as both a noun and a verb. We use it too much as a noun - the thing, quantified, held assets, bought and sold, numbers on spreadsheets, cans on a shelf, boxes to put people in. We need to think of it more as a verb, an act - of giving shelter, of reciprocity, of care. Care for our communities and for ourselves, our past and future selves, our young and old selves, our Pluriversal more-than-human selves, our collective selves. That’s a culture worth searching for in our mirror.
Homes are important because they are such a core part of being human - we all need one to frame our lives, we hold that in common along with the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe. Almost everything else is optional. So when our homes are not fit for purpose, it’s a problem; when some people have two and some people have none, it’s a problem; when they are seen as capital investment rather than social investment, it’s a problem; when people die because they can’t heat them, it’s a problem; when people are made ill by mould and toxic materials, it’s a problem; when people are isolated because of how they are designed and located, it’s a problem.
We can of course measure the social, heath and environmental value in housing, but we don’t because their stakeholders don’t hold agency over the provision of homes. Doctors can’t prescribe a healthy home even if it’s killing you. No amount of A.I. ‘growth’ will connect people to place and create a community of mutually-supporting neighbours out of a number of individuals living in spatial proximity.
The Obstacle Becomes the Way
But - turn that on it’s head and the same rule applies. It’s because our homes are so ubiquitous, so deep, so connected, that they hold the potential to be such a lever for positive change. They have the ability to transform all of our lives, enable people to thrive, finding our human place among the homes of all the other animals and plants that make their home in Scotland. A culture of connection beats a culture of commodification every time.
Donella Meadows said the strongest lever for systems change is culture change. To pull this lever requires a change in agency. Scotland has one of the narrowest housing sectors in Europe, with real power vested in very few individuals and organistaions, all on the supply side. The most powerful thing we can do to enable change is vest agency in the people who live in homes, and take it away from those who produce housing. Change the criteria, change the metrics, and you change the outcomes.
The problem is not design, it’s not lack of research, it’s not money (we are the 6th richest country in the world) the problem is agency. As Faith Ougham of Friend Autism Scotland said to our room full of professionals and academics, there are voices not in the room who are fed up being talked down to and told what their needs are. Turn the conversation the other way round, invert the pyramid, and it will be far healthier for everyone.
Appropriate homes can’t just be an option for the few. One of the case studies in Stirling was a development of newbuild Almshouses, shortlisted for the Stirling Prize and described in the Architect’s Journal this week as giving ‘South Londoners social continuity and connection into their senior years…a benchmark for older people’s social housing’. But delivered by an affluent private Charity at £4,330/m2, it maybe aspirational, but its not equitably replicable at scale under the current paradigm.
Homes touch us all, so when they fail, it hurts us all, but with a culture change, they have the potential to transform every community across the land, giving us safety, security, resilience, an ability to thrive in all our spatial, physical, cognitive and cultural diversity.
What is Our Culture?
As our culture moves away from organised religious practice, we are being asked what we believe in, what we hold important, where we place value now and for the future, for our people, our places, our culture and our planet. Churches are just one current symptom. We see the same questions played out in the public sector – how many historic schools have we seen destroyed by fire as they wait to be turned into housing?
Housing is a strategic cultural challenge for Scotland just now, one that we all have a vested interest in. The top-down, siloed culture of housing delivery we have inherited fails to elevate it from an outdated challenge of delivery economics to the vital challenge of living culture that it was shown to be at these twin gatherings of diverse experts and stakeholders.
All good talk, but talking has become so boring. Let’s do something, please, let’s do something.