Big Houses

I think about housing a lot.

It seems to me that guaranteeing safe, high-quality housing for everyone would render a large swathe of charitable organisations and government bureaucracies unnecessary, whilst markedly improving the lives of millions of people and measured counts of quality of life across physical health, mental health, safety, crime, nutrition, and general happiness. The Guardian recently published an article on the astounding sums expended by the rulers of Australia propping up the current system that leaves nearly everyone doomed to a lifetime of debt and rental payments — or sleeping anywhere they can, whether a doorway, a car or a friend's couch — whilst a shrinking minority get fat on the capital gains from their seventh investment property:

counting in the generous tax concessions allowed to homeowners as well as direct assistance such as direct lending, we have calculated that the public purse is already effectively pumping more than $100bn into our housing system each and every year.

I imagine what $100B annually spent directly on actually building homes and putting people in them could do for people in this country. But I also pause to wonder whether it might even make things worse. Saurabh Arora and Andy Stirling's 'Degrowth and the Pluraverse' reminds us that more of the same, but at a slower speed, isn't really a recipe either for happiness or planetary environmental recovery. And so I'm back to my regular musing about what it might be like to live in a secular monastery. I have a former convent down the road, so it's something that pops into my mind more often than might be considered normal. Getting up at 4am to pray to "God" for a few hours before breakfast doesn't really appeal, but the idea of living with a community, with communal meals, growing food and making things together, caring for each other's children, building and maintaining infrastructure together — this is very appealing to me. Of course, I know all the stories about the American "back to the landers", the Australian "hippy communes" and other 1960s and 70s group living projects that exploded. I also have kibbutzim on my mind — the ones that didn't collapse are still usually impositions on a landscape that only has space for them because of the power of the Israeli military, which took the land by force. It's a stark warning for those in settler colonies like Australia, that things are never simple and certainly never pure.

Yet my fascination with the possibilities of communal life remains. I recently read about Hakkan 'Tolou' houses in Fujian, and when I write "houses" I mean massive multi-story fortress apartment blocks housing up to 800 people and dating from the twelfth century. I had never heard of these before and nor, apparently, have lots of Han Chinese people. The tolou are mostly empty now, with the former residents drawn to the big cities for work, and tourists travelling the other way to gawk — a whole way of life now a "heritage attraction". The main reason provided for the abandonment of the tolou is "no plumbing" but it's presumably more complicated than that. I can certainly see how living in something architecturally similar to Jeremy Bentham's model for the Panopticon could have its drawbacks, but boy that could really be a supportive and close community to live in, if managed right.

Last night I watched a show on "festive foods" and learned of another community that still practies communal living — the Iban of Borneo. The community were celebrating Gawai Dayak, and between my amusement at the women being interviewed who were up front about their dislike of cooking some of the festival foods (because they're complex recipes that are easy to mess up), I took in the lifestyle of the village. They live all together in a "longhouse", but whilst the lifestyle is still fairly traditional, the building's construction doesn't seem to be. With corrugated steel roofing, and a main ruai (gallery) that looked as much as anything like a school or hospital hallway from a rich country, this is not a traditionally constructed building. Yet it's clear the community still live in a very similar way culturally to their ancestors. The longhouse is the village, with families taking rooms off to the side, sharing a massive outdoor verandah space for drying paddy rice and other foods, and celebrating the festival together in the forest, at the river, and in the ruai. Based on the way this story was told, probably the longhouse is only as full as it looked on this annual festival, much as the lutou fill up for traditional festivals, with city cousins returning for a few days. Nevertheless, it's a continuing culture showing another way we could all live.

It's not housing, but it is another example of traditional communal community strengthening through physical community infrastructure. The Huinchiri people from Cuscu were in the news after they rebuilt a bridge that had fallen into disrepair due to the restrictions of COVID-19 preventing it's usual maintenance regime. The Q’eswachaka Bridge has been used for 500 years, so why did it fall over so easily without maintenance? It's made by hand-weaving handmade ropes together, over a rather hair raising ravine. I love everything about this.

=> Degrowth and the Pluriverse | The Australian public purse is already pumping big money into housing – just not where it’s needed | China's Remote Fortresses Lose Residents, Gain Tourists | Tulou | Iban people | Bridge made of string: Peruvians weave 500-year-old Incan crossing back into place | How China went from celebrating ethnic diversity to suppressing it