You also outright lied about immigration by framing it as irregular and tiny. It's 700k net a year every year for the last few. 1.5 million people added to the population in the last 2 years alone. They all need to live somewhere.
@@quillo2747 The housing crisis is caused by a lack of social housing not by immigration. As the video shows the government simply stopped building new houses and privatised the entire housing stock. Even if we didn't desperately need immigration to prop up the countries failing social system we should never have stopped building new houses or removed housing from social ownership.
Great video as always! I can't stress this enough, the UK is a green desert and the bucolic green belt that many strive to protect is an ecological wasteland. Conventional farming practices are destroying nature and the romantic image of small time farmers living off the land is bullshit perpetuated by agri-barons and the farming lobby. A lot of the arguments against building housing are built on this lie. Rewilding and conservation is desperately needed but as this video points out it doesn't need to come at the cost of access to social housing. We can and must have both.
Rewilding would be disastrous for the UK too, we're already a significant net food importer, leaving us extremely vulnerable to events disrupting the global supply chain. If we sacrificed even more of our local food production, we just put ourselves at even greater risk of famine. Plus, rewilding the UK would be a very colonialist thing to do - pushing our food production abroad just makes it harder for places like India, China, Kenya, Brazil etc to rewild themselves, because now we're paying them to destroy their ecosystems so that we can rebuild ours. And given that the UK's ecosystems are pretty simple and boring, it really makes more sense to use UK land for food production so that tropical land can be given to the much more vibrant ecosystems those climates can support.
@@yurisei6732 The UK's ecosystems are absolutely not simple and boring. The soil biota alone is staggeringly diverse and when restored to its natural state these islands harbour a huge variety of species. Food sovereignty and self sufficiency simply cannot be achieved through conventional agriculture in the British isles. We must rapidly develop technologies like precision fermentation, perennial grains and permaculture management systems before we stand a chance of changing that situation. Our insistence on producing food in the UK through conventional agriculture is an enormous driver of the exact type of deforestation and ecocide you decry. By comparison if we imported the food we actually need we would dramatically decrease the shadow acreage we silently hold back from being rewilded in the global south by importing disgusting amounts of animal feed. This over-reliance on animal agriculture is the true colonialism as we force countrys in the global south to destroy their ecosystems when they already produce a surplus enough for all humanity. This system is not just, but you don't change that by refusing to import food. You change it by forming solidarity networks internationally and exchanging fairly.
@@quillo2747 The planet has more than enough arable land for everyone, importing food from more productive countries means that we can rewild more of the country and more of the planet overall. Its a win for everyone involved. By contrast the green spaces you celebrate are being over farmed and over grazed to produce barely any food at all. We can rewild these spaces and build higher density housing on existing brown field sites to get the best of both worlds.
I see the same problems in my city in Germany. There was a large piece of empty land next to my flat (there had formerly been a factory building there) and it grew over and provided habitat for birds, small mammals and the like. And now they have put single family homes there. They could easily have built another 4 storey high block, just like the ones that the neighbourhood already consists of, and therefor conserve more of the place for wildlife. They could have created a little park with very natural characteristics. It's not as if we have no professionals for nature gardens here in Germany. But no - it has to be ugly block houses with biologically dead lawns and fences that no hedgehog can squeeze under.
Even a small strip of unkempt greenery can provide so much life. I live next to a bush, about 1600m2 but most of it is just 5m broad. Residents in the area, including me, provide bird food in winter. I've spotted 12 different types of bird the past year, despite living in a 300.000 city. You could definitely combine high rise with nature, especially if there's a network of greenery for birds, hedgehogs and insects. Thankfully in the Netherlands there's some efforts to turn people's yard greener too, provide free seeds for native flowers, turn manicured grassy fields into wild meadows etc.
@@DanDanDoe Exactly! The apartment blocks that I live in have been built in the 1930s and modernized during the last twenty years. They are four storeys high, have several entrances and are separated by large meadows with some trees and brushes. The meadows are meant to be used for drying laundry or for playing children, but they also are the home of a population of hares. Hares are actually steppe animals and want open grasslands, that's why they followed humans into Europe once the humans started cutting down the forests here to do agriculture. Nowadays, though, the agricultural areas have become so toxic and hostile to life, that no hare, no hamster, no bird and no insect can survive there. That's why the hares started to come into the cities to live in parks, fallow lands, campuses and between homes. I just came home from my garden on my bicycle and saw three hares grazing in various places between the housing blocks. Oh, and we also get bats here, because it seems the trees and meadows provide enough insects that bats can hunt between the housing blocks.
I honestly don’t understand people who think wind turbines are ugly, they aren’t that bad. They’re not beautiful but surely they’re not unsightly, they’re certainly better than the alternative.
@@DieNibelungenliad "Wind turbines have long garnered scrutiny for killing birds that fly into their spinning blades or tall towers. Much of the data about bird deaths at wind facilities in the United States comes from studies published in 2013 and 2014. Those studies gave a wide range for the number of birds that die in wind turbine collisions each year: from 140,000 up to 679,000. The numbers are likely to be higher today, because many more wind farms have been built in the past decade. Those numbers are not insignificant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the birds killed annually in other ways, like flying into buildings or caught by prowling house cats, which past studies have estimated kill up to 988 million and 4 billion birds each year, respectively. Other studies have shown that many more birds-between 12 and 64 million each year-are killed in the U.S. by power lines, which connect wind and other types of energy facilities to people who use the electricity." -MIT Climate Portal I think the concerns about killing of birds are unreasonable if we set them in the bigger context. Still local people could be distressed by the sound of the windturbines, but knowing that sth like the autobahn is 70 dezibels loud even 600 meters away and normal night traffic is limited by law in Germany upto 45 dezibels the hearable 30-37 decibels produced by wind turbines are less of a problem. Bye, have a great day!
Basic living needs never should be commodities or investments. As such many living spaces wouldn't be short term Airbnb apartments to begin with, resulting to less homeless. And sure all you mentioned 🥰
@@DieNibelungenliad Life expectancy statistics. A lack of air will kill you in minutes. A lack of water will kill you in days. A lack of food will kill you in months. A lack of shelter will kill you in years (or if you have a particularly mild climate: decades).
Yeah, if something is an investment, then its value must go up on average over time. If housing prices go up relative to income, then each generation will be able to invest a smaller percentage of their income in it. This is basically the engine that drives "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer". Since the poor are the ones doing the actually productive work, reducing their quality of life reduces their productivity, which means less products for everyone.
Unfortunately housing as an investment was a really important part of economic growth post wwii and because of that we still can't be pushed to see it as an overall harmful thing. Its still seen as one of the few ways lower classes can make big investments (even though it has always disproportionately benefitted the wealthy), despite the fact that it's not even possible for the lower class today. Call it being stuck in the past, but that is the sentiment of larger society.
The problem isn't house availability its house affordability, i walk past empty new builds for last 5 years. Its also important to note we are heavily dependent on food imports, and not growing own foods. which will be a problem if a world war breaks or something drastic happens. we need farm lands still.
Actually, I think these two situations are complementing each other which leads to a downward spiral. About the war; it is already here. We are living in the cold one (barring Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine) and this is going to get worse with Pacific.... Better be prepared than sorry, I say.
right?! there is a wind turbine park just over the border with Austria. I love driving through it, it looks so picturesque with the small hills and fields. I love watching them all spin, it´s calming and meditative
Its the same everywhere... This craziness needs to stop. This will either end in war (which is on the horizon) or we make some drastic changes in the system about logistics, values, law, healthcare, education and everything. It is a daunting task, I know; but we really should think about the world we want live in seriously. This will also affect non-human persons; so we should be careful. Cheers for a great video!
Lovely to discover you! my mum keeps horses in somerset at a local farm. The owners intend on changing the fields she currently uses into a solar farm -maybe 10 acres. Around the area, even on the lanes where maybe 20 people ever drive, there are NIMBY posters. I regularly go to the fields (2x a week to 'eyeball' the horses while mum is working late) mum is currently renting (she'll get different fields) and not a SINGLE one is visible from the places ive seen the signs. i know this because around the top edges of the hill are hedges the horses use for shade/wind-break. I cannot view those properties from anywhere up there. At most, the closest main road is visible and the buildings of the village houses there are the size of 2mm or less, nor will the panels be oriented towards the village, which is north of the hill. Instead of ten acres, the claim on the nimby posters is of ten thousand acres -.- If i were a somerset constituent, id be writing to the mp/council in support, but i live across the border.
My main issue with wind turbines is that, the whole bird killing thing could be easily solved if they didn't make so many of them plain in colouration. But some kind of pattern or markings that make it easier for their blades to show up when in full motion and it might not stop all bird deaths. But would go a great way to reducing them as the birds and bats in some cases would have an easier time seeing them. Since from what I understand the main cause is the fact that in their current state both birds and bats have a hard time seeing or judging the space between the moving blades. Though I could be fully wrong on this. On a separate note I think some of the turbines I have seen need to be a bit taller to work more effectively but at least a few I can confirm were shortened because of nimbyish. The very reason given being the view. That being said I fully agree they are much less harmful then actual climate change and I am not against them being used. I find them fascinating to watch actually and wouldn't object to some of the car show warehouses here being taken down and replaced by them. Since we used to have open fields and woods before they were built and no one complained then. Planting more trees in highstreets and semi- urban areas would also help where possible.
There's also a scale issue in the perception. Yes, wind turbines kill birds... but you could build a hundred times as many turbines as the UK has today and they would still be killing fewer birds than the domestic cat population. But no-one seriously proposes banning domestic cats. Windows kill far more birds than turbines, but who wants to modify building codes to mandate high-visibility markings on the panes? Yet somehow, when wind turbines are mentioned, opponents of turbines suddenly find a reason to place far more value upon wildlife than they do in other circumstances. If you really want to protect wild birds, try promoting collar bells.
@@vylbird8014 Oh in real life I do bring up collar bells whenever it makes sense to do so. I'm not arguing against wind turbines, only stating how easy it would be to sort the issue. But as you said no one is wanting to do it for some reason, same as with windows. I'm actually pro wind turbine I apologise if that was not the given impression. And if I miss understood your comment I apologise for that to. It is hard for me sometimes to tell if text is directed at me or just giving examples in agreement.
@@bramvanduijn8086 Interesting and good to know. Is that on all of them or do some still need this upgrade? I ask as I am not sure where to check up on this.
I would love for wind turbines to have colourful decorations and markings, we should paint them like easter eggs 😊 then they would add joy to the view as well
Sharing tools, amanities and vehicles is a real solution. But I think a lot of us have either not experienced it in the past or have had bad housemates. It might feel liberating to finally have your own washing machine. It's just there when you need it. You don't need to wait for 2h for your roommate to wash her three G-strings. On another hand, it is also big, expensive, and you run it for a few hours every week. We could say the same about tools such as drills and screwdrivers. Everyone owns at least one, and uses it a coucple hours in their entire life. During the European soccer cup, my boyfriend and I walked through a town to see through each window families watching the same soccer game on their giant TVs. My point is: a 20m² appartment feels bigger when you don't have to store as many things inside. Dus huising does not need to be built huge. Of course we also need variety. A student, a young worker, a couple, a family, or an eldery do not have the same needs. We shouldn't really expect to spend our life in one place. And it's the same with cars. Roads and parking spaces take up a huge area of land. If we reduce the need for cars (with care sharing services, better bike infrastructure, better public transport, closer amenities...), we can use that land for nature or huising.
Definitely. I’ve had my fair share of mid housemates and definitely don’t want to be co-living for life. Variety and autonomy is super important. But either way sharing more resources with tool libraries etc is definitely very solarpunk
Excellent comment overall. As to "we shouldn't expect to live in the same place our whole life", we should. We should have all those different kinds of housing in a small section of a community very close and intermixed. That way you can go from starter flat, to family house, to elderly all still in the same neighborhood. This keeps enthusiasm, stability, and experience in a community and it's organizations like co-ops or other places, rather than splitting them into isolated and disempowered "consumers".
@@Trainguy9000 Oh I meant in the same home. I absolutely agree that a diversity of housing should be found within a small distance. Either to accomodate for life changes while remaining in the community, or just so that people from all stages of life get to interact.
"Oh you just had bad housemates" isn't something you can say in this context though where you're advocating that everyone live and work communally. Those bad housemates don't disappear when you do that, they become unavoidable. In anarchist communes, *everyone* gets the bad housemate. The washing machine is always in use, the kitchen is always dirty, the car is always out of fuel. Private living is as much to sequester the bad housemate on their own as it is to escape the bad housemate yourself, so what do you do when life is public? Exile the selfish, careless or neurodivergent people? Or have special private living arrangements for those people, thereby incentivising everyone to behave selfishly so they get to live alone?
@@yurisei6732 I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution to bad housemates, and they are a fact of life - some people just don't care so much about keeping things clean, behave more selfishly than others, or have a disability that makes them do proportionately less of the work, some people have more resources or motivation to help others. It's just something that has to be accounted for sensibly when planning shared rules for a space to incentivise pitching in and mutual accountability whilst also sharing workload so that a messy kitchen or broken appliance isn't overloading or disproportionately inconveniencing any single member. I've lived in a variety of more and less communal housing over my adult life and seen some varieties of approaches, some better than others - in one shared house, we all paid one person a bit every month to be responsible for maintaining the appliances and repairing them or calling in a repairman if they weren't working. Making sure you actually have enough capacity for the people living in a space (fridge space, washing machines, storage...) is another key for people to not feel squeezed. Nowadays like a lot of Finns I live in a small flat in a mid-rise block around a shared garden, with a communal laundry, rubbish and recycling collection and a sauna (mind you this is run by a for-profit company and non-ideal in some ways, but co-op versions are also common). Times for using these are reserved by residents in advance and part of the rent goes to contracting a maintenance company to regularly clean and maintain those shared facilities, which is effective enough that my block of 60+ flats gets along fine with two large washing machines and a couple of drying rooms. The difference between "bad housemate is a nightmare who makes your life miserable" and "bad housemate occasionally inconveniences you" is mostly a solvable logistics and communication problem (and a little bit of an expectation adjustment).
And we have more empty homes in the uk than people! And as for moldy homes I read that an ozone machine can break down mold. And there are so many empty abandoned homes up in the North especially in the North East. What this country needs to do is encourage people to move up north in some towns up north there are WHOLE ROADS of empty houses.
But it's impossible to encourage people to move north because the north is economically barren. The UK is not a country, it is a city-state with some outlands. All the wealth goes to the city, then all the brains go to the city because that's where the money, jobs and commodities are. The only way this could possibly ever change is if parliament was permanently moved to the north, forcing parliamentarians to care about northern infrastructure.
As a German, I want to congratulate you on pronouncing "Wohnbaugenossenschaften" pretty well. Next step: Saying "Wohnungsbaugenossenschaften", which is the term used in Germany. (wohnen = to live, to reside | Wohnung = flat, appartment)
you might be interested in bridport's co-housing development. people are already living there and though iv only heard about it twice, seen it's own vids, it looks like a successful project. I wish i'd known there were people like that when i lived in bridport 15+ yrs ago XD EDIT; i believe that something like 60% of the british/uk land is owned by 1% of the people, the aristocracy in particular. Poundbury (the new chaotic monstrosity of an eyesore clash of non-compatible architectural designs when u are actually there in person) on the outskirts of dorchester is owned by king charles from when he was the prince in waiting. Every house/business on that land has to pay rent to him. All they have bought is the bricks n mortar of the buildings
the systemic changes must come first. Without it any project and big investment will be a drop in a bucket doomed to evaporate or be sucked up in the name of profit.
2 other things I'm concerned about with uk land and housing is 1. There are thousands of houses and buildings that are empty in the uk. 2. We only make like 40 smth percent of our food is produced here.
At the end of the day it comes down to Economics. The UK is in a similar position as much of the rest of the developed world. Aging population, aging infrastructure that needs maintenance and replacement. Due to demographics (read, population bubble) our societies are inevitably structure to cater to the needs of that plurality who also control the largest portion of the wealth. Most of our societies more or less eradicated senior poverty that was common in our great grand parents' generations, but at the cost of younger people's wellbeing. Additionally, we have a spiral of negative feedback loops. A huge amount of seniors that require outside care and soak up social resources while contributing nothing compounded by aging infrastructure and institutions that need repair, maintenance, and revitalization. That takes A LOT OF money and resources at a time when there are fewer and fewer young people of prime working age to fuel the taxbase. Oh, and also, global politics and the global economy is rougher and more competitive than it has been in decades. Maybe ever. What do you do? It's not as simple as opening the floodgates on immigration. Immigration is one small necessary component, but it has to be used as a tool in your nation/society like anything else. Immigrants by and large can bring in lots of unskilled labor to your country, but that isn't what is needed right now. You need architects, engineers, power plant operators, nurses and healthcare professionals, teachers, etc. Lots of skilled labor. It takes a generation or two for immigrants to start producing those kinds of people. If you go too much too fast you can easily just create yet another societal underclass as there aren't resources available to integrate the huge swathes of unskilled labor and people of a foreign culture into your society/workfroce, etc. Obviously this also creates a huge amount of social unrest as well if you are literally importing and creating social underclasses and not integrating them. What is needed is lots of skilled labor. These problems will not be fixed in our generation as they are largely a demographic/generational issue. Right now, since there is no plan, they will only continue to get worse. What is actually needed are programs that make having families and educating and training a competent workforce affordable and practical.
house building is a red herring, while the housing crisis has worsened, the housing surplus has increased. The issue isn't having enough houses, it is that no one can afford to live in them. The real problems include removing protections for tenants (such as rent controls) and protecting the interests of landlords, and the right to buy legislation which has massively reduced the social housing stock. A good book came out recently about this called "against landlords - How To Fix The Housing Crisis" I really recommend reading it if you're interested in the topic, even if you don't agree with it.the arguments, it gives a really good history of housing policy in the UK, (most shocking to me was that less than 10% of houses were privately rented in the UK in the 1950s!!)
Love this video so much. This is exactly what we're trying to do here on Kalapuya Land, Eugene, Oregon USA. A free solarpunk community third space fablab flex hub that can help address housing, food, climate, and more. Our town is number 1 for homeless per capita in the US. Nonprofit community land trusts indeed seem like one of the most potent frameworks. So exciting & encouraging to see the collective solarpunk vision(s) emerging globally!
Great video, really quite comprehensive. The only thing I would add is that the UK has tons of property that could be lived in but isn't for purely economic reasons.
A problem in my humble opinion is that fact that people are reluctant to actually live where the land and the housing is cheap. Rural areas are dying while the big cities just keep growing. That takes a change of culture and mindset to change or maybe even just economical necessity.
Just wanted to say thank you towards the thought and detail put into this video over a topic your clearly passionate about. The applicability being one of many positives of it, as I'm a local born and raised in Hawai'i and couldn't help my attention being drawn every time you mentioned an issue you guys have been having over housing or whatever. The reactionary sentiment towards outsiders, the lack of supply and demand created by economic incentives, go's to show how helpful your vid and the info overall could be to plenty others! ^w^ Thanks so much!
Love the video, but one thing I will say is that we shouldn't build houses with shared kitchens. Truly nothing would stir up more hate in a community than that. But I like the idea of a shared community area, such as parks, living space (games rooms, bars/cafe, etc). Basically need to build communities around the idea of somewhere in which you can use if you want, but not one that you have to use.
I love this vision for the future. I don't think we need to build more homes in most of the developed world, but renovate the ones we have to make them more eco-symbiotic. Here in the US I think empty homes outnumber the unhoused 24:1 and they're still building more. Urban sprawl is barely existent on a global scale, as all cities, towns and roads cover only 1% of the land surface. Nature has more opportunity to really return on the 42% of our planet devoted to farming and feeding animals... as well as in the ocean where we unalive a further 3 trillion animals annually... most of whom we feed to farmed animals. If we just ate plants instead of animals, we could easily bring back nature more than any other combination of approaches combined.
Across the pond, the Netherlands laughs at the UK, thinking it's overpopulated. Don't get me wrong, I think we can probably house a lot more people, but we're probably the most solarpunk countries in the world. And I'm not exaggerating-after all, we reclaimed land to expand our capacity to house people. Still, even the Netherlands has issues with housing. It's not because of lack of space, but because we have solarpunked so hard that technology hasn't come up with a solution for nitrogen pollution yet. The rest of the world deals with carbon dioxide and methane, while we can't make a bucket of cement [hyperbole] without considering how we're contributing to the nitrogen in the atmosphere. Honestly, though, it could be really cool if the UK reached out to the Netherlands to reclaim some of the land from the ocean that the UK has lost over the past two millennia.
The Netherlands has housing problems for the same reason as the UK: Housing is an investment, and the value of investments go up faster than inflation, by definition. If it didn't, it wouldn't get any investors. What happens if houses keep getting more expensive faster than inflation/income increases?Then each generation will be able to invest a smaller percentage of income in their house. (Sidenote: inflation and income are coupled in NL because the Unions negotiate wages to at least match inflation) FYI The nitrogen problem isn't about the air, the air doesn't care about more Nitrogen compounds. Elementary Nitrogen (N2) is harmless, and the biologically relevant Nitrogen compounds (NH3 and NO3) are water soluble, so rain will pull them out of the air. The problem with Nitrogen comes from the ground water, and even then only near the nature reserves. And even that wouldn't be as big a problem if NL hadn't promised the EU they would improve the quality of those nature reserves in exchange for EU funding. Taking money and then not delivering on your part of the deal is a bit of an issue.
We just waste too much space on agriculture in the Netherlands. Half of the country is agricultural land, most of which is used for livestock which is mainly exported. Agriculture only represents a small percentage of the Dutch economy and an even smaller percentage of the job market.
So many landlords are turning to shortterm/holiday lets because changes in taxes have meant it is barely profitable to rent long-term. Air BnB is far more work, either for them or for someone they pay to manage it but it’s far more profitable.
And yet they keep closing shops , libraries and supermarkets for more flats. All this houses who's gonna live in them especially with how expensive London and other areas of England has become. Ridiculous
Homeless people are homeless by their own choice: Choice to not study hard enough at school Choice to not work hard enough their whole life IN HIGHER EDUCATION DEMANDING WORK POSITION Choice to drink alcohol Choice to take drugs Choice to commit illegal activity Choice to make bad life choices in general Choice to not think about the future when they were young Choice to not get a job that pays well enough (just study more!) This applies to ALL countries/cities/places on earth
The wind turbines thing, there are versions out there that don't kill birds, I wish we'd move to that model instead. I can understand the view thing though, it's weird driving through fields of them, feels alien sometimes if they are the only thing out there. Also, world population drops everywhere world wide but at the same time housing crisis everywhere too.... The main thing is trying to get people back into places outside major cities, once farming no longer became such a big deal, there was less reason for people to live out in places that had more housing as jobs where more rare then.
Great video as ever, and as an unemployed 24 year old in the UK the talk about lacking housing certainly speaks to me 😅 I was wondering how you feel about the production of sustainable energy resources such as wind. I've always been very pro-green energy, but as I've read more about the Democratic Republic of the Congo and how cobalt mining is extorting and killing an entire population, I've found myself at a loss. Wind turbines use cobalt for their magnets, solar panels use it, and I'm sure if I looked into the other metals and materials being used to make these things I'd find a similar bloody path. How do we push for a green world when our technologies are painting other nations red with blood? Are our renewable energy supplies really renewable if we must use unrenewable resources to harvest them? Do we have any humane alternatives?
The answer is don't think about it. The prosperity of the UK depends upon the exploitation of other nations. That's unavoidable. The UK is a value-adding economy, not a natural resource producer, which means we live off the profit generated by taking natural resources from poor countries and selling them as manufactured goods to rich countries. If we stopped all the exploitation that fuels the UK economy, our living standards would crash so low that we wouldn't have any electricity at all, let alone a debate between cobalt-reliant wind turbines or gas-reliant power plants. This is the big problem in utopic imagination. We like to pretend that the whole world can be just as happy and healthy as the Norwegians, but they can't. Our above-average wellbeing is directly related to other countries having below-average wellbeing. An equal world would be the average global wellbeing, not the peak wellbeing Brits have today. So, it's best not to think about it.
I disagree with Yuri Sei. We absolutely need to think about this stuff. With enough investment in infrastructure and training we can recycle the rare earth metals these technologies depend on and end the cycle of exploitation. Developed countries like the UK absolutely have the capital to change this situation so we need to create mass movements capable of forcing our governments hand. With enough political will we can have both renewable technology and the end of neocolonialist and extractivist capitalism.
@@DownTheStream Recycling does not create more resources. It's not magic. It just reduces the amount of the resource lost over time - the resource is still finite, which means if you distribute access to it evenly, everyone's amount decreases over time as the population grows and resources are sequestered from the cycle of reuse.
the problem with all of this and what is happening at the moment. we KNOW HOW to solve all of our issues. we can AFFORD all of these if we spent wisely and taxed people equally. BUT.... the people at the top just decide not to.
something ive noticed is that when you apply a top down approach in an attempt to build more progressive housing developments nimbyism comes out in droves, but in countries that have the poltical infrastructure to build things from the ground up (the peoples decision) they tend to just get on with it, as that system allows from the community to actually be involved with the project (and benefit) directly, SUDDENLY their anxiety about their housing investment, green space, migration simply go out the window when they're no longer worried about the money in their back pocket (main countries to use for example would be denmark, switzerland and surprisingly enough, japan) these countries have their problems obviously but their ability to just build quality infrastructure without 10 years of arguing before a single shovel hits the ground is admirable (copenhagen is close to finishing a tramway 27km in length that they started in 2018 BECAUSE of this system as before construction began they put together what i believe was called the "copenhagen suburban co-operative" not sure if that was the exact name but co-operative is in there... because you know... these things require.... CO-OPERATION??)
Wish we would build a load of earthships, they're very labour intensive but the bulk of that is just pounding earth into tires, the skilled part presumably not more than a conventional house. I'm sure a lot of people on benefits would be interested to get involved if it was a well facilitated community experience. Then of course you could give sentences for minor crimes rather than short custodial sentences. The thing is they call these recent style homes on these horrible scabby new developments, all sealed up air tight and made out of the latest polystyrene or whatever "passive homes." Its such a joke compared to earth ships that have actual passive heating and cooling from solar gain and thermal mass, as well as actual decent air quality even if your battery bank or complex air filtration fails... Of course from many angles earth ships are just green roof mounds and very well integrated into the natural aesthetics of a landscape.
They are pretty cool (pun intended), but they're low density housing, which means infrastructure gets expensive. All those kilometers of pipes, wires, and roads need to be maintained. So they have their place but 're not the only thing we should be building. You're going to want a lot of medium and high density housing as well.
Earthships are awesome! I forgot to mention them in this video, which is silly, because I read the book ‘Architecture and Anarchism’ a few months ago and it had so many cool examples of them.
Earthships aren't that good in temperate climates. They work well for warm climates, though. But we might consider bringing back the traditional European pit house. Sadly, it comes with its own problems and will definitely not be for everybody.
@@solarpunkalana earth ships are a specific form of passive housing using high quantities of mass (earth) to get thermal benefits rather than using low mass structures and high energy inputs. High mass / passive architecture can be planned in many other forms too. This includes mid-rise and mixed uses. The low mass/ high energy inputs buildings worked for the housing developers, profiteers. UK needs a way to incentivise high mass / low energy buildings.
@@johannageisel5390 OK so what are the actual issues with earthships in temperate climates in your understanding? "Not good" in comparison to what? Obviously you adjust the details according to the location, Michael Reynolds has built "earthships" in various climates some that look completely different to serve different priority's and taking inspiration from various traditional styles of buildings. What about the design or management can't reasonably be adapted? Let's just go with the standard south facing windows and north side earth bank principle, what's to sniff about the benefits to this style in UK for instance?
Offshore Wind turbines are an option. Otherwise, renewables have many alternatives. Hydro, solar, and then there's tidal/wave energy. However, only someone who has all the facts about what land/sea areas are available, what the costs are (though environmentally friendly should be more important than mere financial costs), and how effective a particular solution would likely be, how much maintanence it would require etc... only somehow with all those facts can really make a good decision. And whoever believes they are in possession of such facts, should share them, rather than imposing their will.
I think wind turbines are pretty neat but I’m not sure they are are the best option for renewables. Generally I’m against massive grid scale installations of renewables on land that could be nature or something else. I’m much more in favor of solar and wind being erected on existing buildings and other developed spaces and keeping our open spaces free of that sort of thing not to mention the environmental impacts on wildlife. Here in the US there is more than enough roof space or other developed space to erect solar and wind. The other issue I’ve heard with wind is the sound generated which apparently can make people sick from what I’ve heard though I do not know for sure. There is apparently though wind technology that is either small scale turbine style or what I’ll call steady state being worked on which may solve many of the objections to wind. Here in the US I think small scale renewables are the best option for off grid and what I’ll call end grid applications meaning houses located far outside of cities where the houses powered per mile of power lines decreases significantly. Solar and wind are great for on building applications in cities to help compensate for energy but the other issue is battery storage which needs to be significantly increased to fully power the grid off these types of renewables. A better option and increasingly better and safer is nuclear in my opinion. It takes up far less land per unit of energy. It’s very safe and is capable of providing base power very efficiently. Additionally some newer models of reactor being worked on like the molten salt reactor may well increase fuel utilization to 90+% versus the less than 5% or so it currently is. Waste heat from molten salt reactors could also be used for district heating and more importantly in my opinion for CO2 capture technologies and conversion of that CO2 into carbon neutral fuels or chemical feedstocks to power industry and transportation utilizing much of our existing petrochemical infrastructure to ease the transition to green energy while still retaining many of the benefits of carbon based fuels. With transportation we could also work on modifying existing carbon based fuel cells to be used in vehicles thus boosting fuel efficiency 2-3 fold and eliminating other pollutants like nox and Sox that could be formed in ICEs and also reducing the weight and quantity of batteries for what would be carbon based hybrid electric vehicles. Electric vehicles work great for some applications and will no doubt improve with better battery technology reducing weight and increasing safety and range capacity. Currently however electric vehicles are very heavy causing more damage to roadways and potentially causing more damage in car accidents. Lithium battery tech is dangerous when damaged. And range is limited especially when traveling through low population areas like the central US. Many of these problems will be solved as time progresses but the advantages of liquid fuel especially when paired with a fuel cell and smaller battery would no doubt be enormous.
Thanks for the detailed comment! Lots of interesting points. For sure the ‘which energy’ debate is something that’s always ongoing. To be honest I haven’t made my mind up about nuclear, and I do think a mixture of renewables is probably the best bet for the UK (wind, solar, hydro, etc). I think sometimes renewables can be integrated into nature - ie offshore wind turbines make great fish nurseries and solar panels in a field can be combined with a wildflower meadow or cattle/sheep grazing for food.
Wind power doesn't scale down well. It's in the physics. Power output is proportional to the radius squared, and the wind speed cubed. If you build the turbine twice as wide you get four times the power. Build it a little taller to get higher wind speed and you get a lot more power. Little toy-turbines on someone's roof are basically worthless for energy generation, though they have a niche in off-grid applications. Wind power means building as big as you can. There is one up-side: The turbines don't actually take up much land, only the area of the tower, so they can share land very easily with agriculture. Turbines above, crops below. Photovoltaics though, they scale down great. You can and should stick those up everywhere. Every empty roof space is a potential site for solar panels.
Solar is generally better (more efficient) and also more decentralize-able. That's why oligarchs prefer wind (or also large solar "farms"): because they can attempt to keep direct control on the sources of energy (and the money they produce).
@@vylbird8014 fair enough I was not aware of the math on wind but that makes sense. I think wind is better for off grid and end grid anyway where the battery storage capacity problem would be much more manageable. But I do recognize they can make sense to put up in some places crop fields etc. another thing I have considered is that some places are better suited to generation of energy via various renewables. Some areas are especially windy or sunny or are located near geothermal features that would make sense to put them there more than anywhere else. So maybe if in the case of wind we are putting them only in areas of the highest return then maybe that’s the happy medium we need though as I said earlier I have also heard of steady state wind being developed which may be better since it solves issues like the bird strike problem and infrasound from the rotating blades if we can make it work and be scaleable.
@@LuisAldamiz makes sense to me monopolies and oligopolies are something we certainly need to address. The two solutions would be either trust busting to increase competition and pushing for more decentralized power or that large scale power generation maybe should just be publicly owned and nonprofit. Or both.
i think i would describe my caravan as solar punk, its autonomous in water, electricity and nearly there in gas,food sort of(the calories are there but i'm not a vegan) there is 50watts of solar in the roof that runs light music, laptop and a pump, as well as a 2 square meter solar water heater, and wood burner chimney with a copper pipe wrapped round it, when i pump water from a clear box with a plastic to the roof i can make hot water either with sun or fire, in my back yard i have 300square meter garden with ponds full of azolla and a poly-culture of of perennial cabbage, jerusalum artichoke, comfrey, rubarb and a rediculas number of other stuff growing together. the point of which is to feed a methane digester whats built out of a wheel bin with a recycle box floating upside down in it, the holes in the box are blocked so as to enable gas collection the bin is heated to 36 DEGREES by a hose pipe filled with hot water that is coiled through the bottom of it (the heat coming either from the solar thermal heater or the coil of copper pipe wrapped round the chimney ) the garden is saturated with leaf area and HARVESTED AT THE RATE OF GROWTH, this mean that i can fill the bin with shredded material + cow manure and collect gas from it, the gas is sufficient to do cooking on, so the energy i use is home brew, the water i use is collected off the roof and filtered, i also have a 250w wind turbine for winter power, and a bikegenerator. most of what i'm doing is in the book "Radical Technology (1976 book)" i highly recommend you read it :) especially page 137.
We have plenty of nature, it's just hijacked by private entities. Only 10% of the entire country is actually developed land (and that includes parks and managed green spaces) only about 8% is built on.
People who complain that we shouldn't build more housing... what is your plan for how to house people, then? People should live in what? Tents in the forest?
No one has ever given me an argument on to why such a small nation needs that many people in it. You can’t even grow enough food to eat for the people that are already there let alone more immigrants.
@@yurisei6732 no one suggested to murder anybody so I don’t know why that is your fetish. Still no argument
3 месяца назад
The people already exist and continue to procreate, albeit at a lower rate than before. What exactly is your argument? If you don't elaborate or offer a solution it's not unreasonable to assume you mean depopulation of some kind.
First, I generally like your idea of popularizing the idea that housing and nature are valid combinations. however, i feel like your solution section is more of a problem description than an actual solution. I think it is incredibly difficult to put houses closer to amenities, and while I agree with the goal, just saying it needs to be done is not a solution. still had some good ideas
Personally I'm not too enthusiastic about the landscape being plastered with skyscraper wind turbines. I imagine that the micro hydro route in combination with serious strategic rejuvenation of the landscape hydrology and watershed patterns should be a more integrated solution to multiple issues to do with water supply, drought, floods, soil carbon, bioremediation ect. Energy storage by pumping water back up to higher catchments and generating again by releasing it back down ect. They have generally wanted very high catchments with long drops for hydro storage, there probably a lot of technical considerations, but I like to think on scale with a smarter grid a series of smaller catchments overflows and spillways would be viable in conjunction with other the other benefits. Honestly though I don't like the idea of plastering huge wind turbines everywhere, they don't last forever. Certainly not until there is a more genuine emphasis on the reality that there is no real substitute for using less overall active energy, and that really we don't need to consume nearly so much to live healthy, happy, reasonably modern lives.
8:24 I'd like to point out that of course the small boats problem is an inflammatory one, it isn't particularly relevant for the concerns over net migration. People who come legally still need homes, jobs, and food. Net migration in the year ending June 2023 was about 880,000, approximately 1.2% of the UK's population. The 1.5 million homes figure that Labour has proposed won't even cover net migration since the end of lockdown.
12:35 "...to invite wildlife into our living dpaces" tell me you're a privileged city girl without telling me you're a privileged city girl. I live in a rural area (SE europe) with a farm and insects are one of if not the worst thing about the summer. The moment it gets cool in the evening and you open the window (we don't have AC) the mosquitos come rushing in and then have a feast on you and you can't sleep the whole night because of the buzzing. Wasps, spiders, centipedes etc. aren't very lovey dovey either. I'll be working outside and then just randomly feel pain, itching and see swelling and reddnes because something bit/stung me, but I don't know what. You live in a fantasy. Go to any person who actually lives in nature (and + if they work there too) and they'll confirm artificial protections are very much liked and preffered to "nature"
It’s refreshing to hear content that is not anti immigrant. There are more displaced people now than ever before (200 million). Conditions for many are shocking. Helping them resettle is the moral issue of our time. Yet the overwhelming sentiment seems to be hate and resentment. Thank you for taking a more positive attitude.
You seem extremely expressive and emplathic, making you very expressive in your motions. However, this translates really bad on video and makes you look very twitchy, Have you considered public speaking where this is a boon? Otherwise, on video, please be a bit less moving? It's really weird on camera. Perhaps even just making it look as if you're talking to a group in a place rather then a camera?
@@solarpunkalana The best option is to not bundle everyone together as if it's "whites" vs the world, especially since the group in Britain that receives the most bigotry is Romani, who would generally be classed as white. Romani, Irish Travellers, Poles, Hindus, black people, Chinese people, Muslims, they all have very different experiences in the UK and can't be lumped together in any useful way.
Still surprising to me that some of us outside the system actually think it would be a good idea, or even want, houses to be packed even more closely together. I'm already living nose to anus with all my neighbors I'm not sure how much closer it can get. You can't open your window without looking into your neighbor's. We need yards and Forest and streams around our housing. Does that mean longer roads and commutes? Absolutely. That's what buses are for. Our Distribution Systems wouldn't be even remotely taxed by a four fold increase in the size of the suburbs around any city.
First video watched by you here. As an American, I have to give some apology. The further rise of white supremacy has to have, in some part, been because of our previous elected Supreme leader. It saddens me that it's happening in your backyard as well.
Oops! I made a maths error - social housing has shrunk by 1.4 million, not 1.6 million, between 1979-2022. Sorry!
Still way too many not being replaced when sold. And less on the waiting list than those that weren't replaced.
You also outright lied about immigration by framing it as irregular and tiny. It's 700k net a year every year for the last few. 1.5 million people added to the population in the last 2 years alone. They all need to live somewhere.
@@quillo2747 The housing crisis is caused by a lack of social housing not by immigration. As the video shows the government simply stopped building new houses and privatised the entire housing stock. Even if we didn't desperately need immigration to prop up the countries failing social system we should never have stopped building new houses or removed housing from social ownership.
Great video as always! I can't stress this enough, the UK is a green desert and the bucolic green belt that many strive to protect is an ecological wasteland. Conventional farming practices are destroying nature and the romantic image of small time farmers living off the land is bullshit perpetuated by agri-barons and the farming lobby. A lot of the arguments against building housing are built on this lie. Rewilding and conservation is desperately needed but as this video points out it doesn't need to come at the cost of access to social housing. We can and must have both.
Rewilding would be disastrous for the UK too, we're already a significant net food importer, leaving us extremely vulnerable to events disrupting the global supply chain. If we sacrificed even more of our local food production, we just put ourselves at even greater risk of famine. Plus, rewilding the UK would be a very colonialist thing to do - pushing our food production abroad just makes it harder for places like India, China, Kenya, Brazil etc to rewild themselves, because now we're paying them to destroy their ecosystems so that we can rebuild ours. And given that the UK's ecosystems are pretty simple and boring, it really makes more sense to use UK land for food production so that tropical land can be given to the much more vibrant ecosystems those climates can support.
@@yurisei6732 The UK's ecosystems are absolutely not simple and boring. The soil biota alone is staggeringly diverse and when restored to its natural state these islands harbour a huge variety of species.
Food sovereignty and self sufficiency simply cannot be achieved through conventional agriculture in the British isles. We must rapidly develop technologies like precision fermentation, perennial grains and permaculture management systems before we stand a chance of changing that situation.
Our insistence on producing food in the UK through conventional agriculture is an enormous driver of the exact type of deforestation and ecocide you decry. By comparison if we imported the food we actually need we would dramatically decrease the shadow acreage we silently hold back from being rewilded in the global south by importing disgusting amounts of animal feed.
This over-reliance on animal agriculture is the true colonialism as we force countrys in the global south to destroy their ecosystems when they already produce a surplus enough for all humanity. This system is not just, but you don't change that by refusing to import food. You change it by forming solidarity networks internationally and exchanging fairly.
You do realise that green space is farmland that produces food. People need food.
@@quillo2747 The planet has more than enough arable land for everyone, importing food from more productive countries means that we can rewild more of the country and more of the planet overall. Its a win for everyone involved. By contrast the green spaces you celebrate are being over farmed and over grazed to produce barely any food at all. We can rewild these spaces and build higher density housing on existing brown field sites to get the best of both worlds.
I see the same problems in my city in Germany.
There was a large piece of empty land next to my flat (there had formerly been a factory building there) and it grew over and provided habitat for birds, small mammals and the like.
And now they have put single family homes there.
They could easily have built another 4 storey high block, just like the ones that the neighbourhood already consists of, and therefor conserve more of the place for wildlife. They could have created a little park with very natural characteristics. It's not as if we have no professionals for nature gardens here in Germany.
But no - it has to be ugly block houses with biologically dead lawns and fences that no hedgehog can squeeze under.
Even a small strip of unkempt greenery can provide so much life. I live next to a bush, about 1600m2 but most of it is just 5m broad. Residents in the area, including me, provide bird food in winter. I've spotted 12 different types of bird the past year, despite living in a 300.000 city. You could definitely combine high rise with nature, especially if there's a network of greenery for birds, hedgehogs and insects. Thankfully in the Netherlands there's some efforts to turn people's yard greener too, provide free seeds for native flowers, turn manicured grassy fields into wild meadows etc.
@@DanDanDoe Exactly!
The apartment blocks that I live in have been built in the 1930s and modernized during the last twenty years.
They are four storeys high, have several entrances and are separated by large meadows with some trees and brushes.
The meadows are meant to be used for drying laundry or for playing children, but they also are the home of a population of hares. Hares are actually steppe animals and want open grasslands, that's why they followed humans into Europe once the humans started cutting down the forests here to do agriculture.
Nowadays, though, the agricultural areas have become so toxic and hostile to life, that no hare, no hamster, no bird and no insect can survive there. That's why the hares started to come into the cities to live in parks, fallow lands, campuses and between homes.
I just came home from my garden on my bicycle and saw three hares grazing in various places between the housing blocks.
Oh, and we also get bats here, because it seems the trees and meadows provide enough insects that bats can hunt between the housing blocks.
I honestly don’t understand people who think wind turbines are ugly, they aren’t that bad. They’re not beautiful but surely they’re not unsightly, they’re certainly better than the alternative.
I agree! I actually really like the look of wind turbines.
Wind turbines are noisy and disproportionately kill lots of birds. They also require oil to build. We're not talking about old windmills here
@@DieNibelungenliad "Wind turbines have long garnered scrutiny for killing birds that fly into their spinning blades or tall towers. Much of the data about bird deaths at wind facilities in the United States comes from studies published in 2013 and 2014. Those studies gave a wide range for the number of birds that die in wind turbine collisions each year: from 140,000 up to 679,000. The numbers are likely to be higher today, because many more wind farms have been built in the past decade.
Those numbers are not insignificant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the birds killed annually in other ways, like flying into buildings or caught by prowling house cats, which past studies have estimated kill up to 988 million and 4 billion birds each year, respectively. Other studies have shown that many more birds-between 12 and 64 million each year-are killed in the U.S. by power lines, which connect wind and other types of energy facilities to people who use the electricity."
-MIT Climate Portal
I think the concerns about killing of birds are unreasonable if we set them in the bigger context. Still local people could be distressed by the sound of the windturbines, but knowing that sth like the autobahn is 70 dezibels loud even 600 meters away and normal night traffic is limited by law in Germany upto 45 dezibels the hearable 30-37 decibels produced by wind turbines are less of a problem. Bye, have a great day!
How much of birds would a diesel or oil derivative power source kill compared to wind turbines? And how much oil.
You know what's even better geothermal energy!
We can't even use most of our land because it's been owned by the same families for a thousand years 😢
I liked how thoroughly you went through the context that leads to NIMBYism, I think that shows the flaws in that kind of thinking even more clearly.
Thank you!
Basic living needs never should be commodities or investments. As such many living spaces wouldn't be short term Airbnb apartments to begin with, resulting to less homeless.
And sure all you mentioned 🥰
Who defines what a basic living need is?
@@DieNibelungenliad Life expectancy statistics.
A lack of air will kill you in minutes.
A lack of water will kill you in days.
A lack of food will kill you in months.
A lack of shelter will kill you in years (or if you have a particularly mild climate: decades).
Yeah, if something is an investment, then its value must go up on average over time. If housing prices go up relative to income, then each generation will be able to invest a smaller percentage of their income in it.
This is basically the engine that drives "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer". Since the poor are the ones doing the actually productive work, reducing their quality of life reduces their productivity, which means less products for everyone.
@@DieNibelungenliad well, when a human being dies without it, it's decided. Do you live on a planet where homeless people don't die from exposure?
Unfortunately housing as an investment was a really important part of economic growth post wwii and because of that we still can't be pushed to see it as an overall harmful thing. Its still seen as one of the few ways lower classes can make big investments (even though it has always disproportionately benefitted the wealthy), despite the fact that it's not even possible for the lower class today. Call it being stuck in the past, but that is the sentiment of larger society.
The problem isn't house availability its house affordability, i walk past empty new builds for last 5 years.
Its also important to note we are heavily dependent on food imports, and not growing own foods. which will be a problem if a world war breaks or something drastic happens. we need farm lands still.
This.
Actually, I think these two situations are complementing each other which leads to a downward spiral. About the war; it is already here. We are living in the cold one (barring Ukraine-Russia and Israel-Palestine) and this is going to get worse with Pacific.... Better be prepared than sorry, I say.
Good video! BTW I can never understand why people consider wind turbines ugly and not black asphalt roades cutting through greenery
right?! there is a wind turbine park just over the border with Austria. I love driving through it, it looks so picturesque with the small hills and fields. I love watching them all spin, it´s calming and meditative
Its the same everywhere... This craziness needs to stop. This will either end in war (which is on the horizon) or we make some drastic changes in the system about logistics, values, law, healthcare, education and everything. It is a daunting task, I know; but we really should think about the world we want live in seriously. This will also affect non-human persons; so we should be careful. Cheers for a great video!
Lovely to discover you! my mum keeps horses in somerset at a local farm. The owners intend on changing the fields she currently uses into a solar farm -maybe 10 acres. Around the area, even on the lanes where maybe 20 people ever drive, there are NIMBY posters. I regularly go to the fields (2x a week to 'eyeball' the horses while mum is working late) mum is currently renting (she'll get different fields) and not a SINGLE one is visible from the places ive seen the signs. i know this because around the top edges of the hill are hedges the horses use for shade/wind-break. I cannot view those properties from anywhere up there. At most, the closest main road is visible and the buildings of the village houses there are the size of 2mm or less, nor will the panels be oriented towards the village, which is north of the hill. Instead of ten acres, the claim on the nimby posters is of ten thousand acres -.-
If i were a somerset constituent, id be writing to the mp/council in support, but i live across the border.
My main issue with wind turbines is that, the whole bird killing thing could be easily solved if they didn't make so many of them plain in colouration. But some kind of pattern or markings that make it easier for their blades to show up when in full motion and it might not stop all bird deaths. But would go a great way to reducing them as the birds and bats in some cases would have an easier time seeing them. Since from what I understand the main cause is the fact that in their current state both birds and bats have a hard time seeing or judging the space between the moving blades. Though I could be fully wrong on this.
On a separate note I think some of the turbines I have seen need to be a bit taller to work more effectively but at least a few I can confirm were shortened because of nimbyish. The very reason given being the view.
That being said I fully agree they are much less harmful then actual climate change and I am not against them being used. I find them fascinating to watch actually and wouldn't object to some of the car show warehouses here being taken down and replaced by them. Since we used to have open fields and woods before they were built and no one complained then. Planting more trees in highstreets and semi- urban areas would also help where possible.
There's also a scale issue in the perception. Yes, wind turbines kill birds... but you could build a hundred times as many turbines as the UK has today and they would still be killing fewer birds than the domestic cat population. But no-one seriously proposes banning domestic cats. Windows kill far more birds than turbines, but who wants to modify building codes to mandate high-visibility markings on the panes? Yet somehow, when wind turbines are mentioned, opponents of turbines suddenly find a reason to place far more value upon wildlife than they do in other circumstances. If you really want to protect wild birds, try promoting collar bells.
@@vylbird8014 Oh in real life I do bring up collar bells whenever it makes sense to do so.
I'm not arguing against wind turbines, only stating how easy it would be to sort the issue. But as you said no one is wanting to do it for some reason, same as with windows.
I'm actually pro wind turbine I apologise if that was not the given impression. And if I miss understood your comment I apologise for that to. It is hard for me sometimes to tell if text is directed at me or just giving examples in agreement.
Nowadays they have sensors and they're turned off if a lot of birds or bats are close.
@@bramvanduijn8086 Interesting and good to know. Is that on all of them or do some still need this upgrade? I ask as I am not sure where to check up on this.
I would love for wind turbines to have colourful decorations and markings, we should paint them like easter eggs 😊 then they would add joy to the view as well
Sharing tools, amanities and vehicles is a real solution. But I think a lot of us have either not experienced it in the past or have had bad housemates. It might feel liberating to finally have your own washing machine. It's just there when you need it. You don't need to wait for 2h for your roommate to wash her three G-strings. On another hand, it is also big, expensive, and you run it for a few hours every week. We could say the same about tools such as drills and screwdrivers. Everyone owns at least one, and uses it a coucple hours in their entire life. During the European soccer cup, my boyfriend and I walked through a town to see through each window families watching the same soccer game on their giant TVs.
My point is: a 20m² appartment feels bigger when you don't have to store as many things inside. Dus huising does not need to be built huge.
Of course we also need variety. A student, a young worker, a couple, a family, or an eldery do not have the same needs. We shouldn't really expect to spend our life in one place.
And it's the same with cars. Roads and parking spaces take up a huge area of land. If we reduce the need for cars (with care sharing services, better bike infrastructure, better public transport, closer amenities...), we can use that land for nature or huising.
Definitely. I’ve had my fair share of mid housemates and definitely don’t want to be co-living for life. Variety and autonomy is super important. But either way sharing more resources with tool libraries etc is definitely very solarpunk
Excellent comment overall. As to "we shouldn't expect to live in the same place our whole life", we should. We should have all those different kinds of housing in a small section of a community very close and intermixed. That way you can go from starter flat, to family house, to elderly all still in the same neighborhood. This keeps enthusiasm, stability, and experience in a community and it's organizations like co-ops or other places, rather than splitting them into isolated and disempowered "consumers".
@@Trainguy9000 Oh I meant in the same home. I absolutely agree that a diversity of housing should be found within a small distance. Either to accomodate for life changes while remaining in the community, or just so that people from all stages of life get to interact.
"Oh you just had bad housemates" isn't something you can say in this context though where you're advocating that everyone live and work communally. Those bad housemates don't disappear when you do that, they become unavoidable. In anarchist communes, *everyone* gets the bad housemate. The washing machine is always in use, the kitchen is always dirty, the car is always out of fuel. Private living is as much to sequester the bad housemate on their own as it is to escape the bad housemate yourself, so what do you do when life is public? Exile the selfish, careless or neurodivergent people? Or have special private living arrangements for those people, thereby incentivising everyone to behave selfishly so they get to live alone?
@@yurisei6732 I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all solution to bad housemates, and they are a fact of life - some people just don't care so much about keeping things clean, behave more selfishly than others, or have a disability that makes them do proportionately less of the work, some people have more resources or motivation to help others. It's just something that has to be accounted for sensibly when planning shared rules for a space to incentivise pitching in and mutual accountability whilst also sharing workload so that a messy kitchen or broken appliance isn't overloading or disproportionately inconveniencing any single member. I've lived in a variety of more and less communal housing over my adult life and seen some varieties of approaches, some better than others - in one shared house, we all paid one person a bit every month to be responsible for maintaining the appliances and repairing them or calling in a repairman if they weren't working. Making sure you actually have enough capacity for the people living in a space (fridge space, washing machines, storage...) is another key for people to not feel squeezed. Nowadays like a lot of Finns I live in a small flat in a mid-rise block around a shared garden, with a communal laundry, rubbish and recycling collection and a sauna (mind you this is run by a for-profit company and non-ideal in some ways, but co-op versions are also common). Times for using these are reserved by residents in advance and part of the rent goes to contracting a maintenance company to regularly clean and maintain those shared facilities, which is effective enough that my block of 60+ flats gets along fine with two large washing machines and a couple of drying rooms. The difference between "bad housemate is a nightmare who makes your life miserable" and "bad housemate occasionally inconveniences you" is mostly a solvable logistics and communication problem (and a little bit of an expectation adjustment).
Im german, so its nature vs housing vs burocracy
And we have more empty homes in the uk than people! And as for moldy homes I read that an ozone machine can break down mold.
And there are so many empty abandoned homes up in the North especially in the North East. What this country needs to do is encourage people to move up north in some towns up north there are WHOLE ROADS of empty houses.
There's a lot of empty houses in places with no work and places where private rent exceeds minimum wages.
There are more empty properties in London than there are homeless in the whole UK, Thanks to foreign investors buying property and leaving it unused.
But it's impossible to encourage people to move north because the north is economically barren. The UK is not a country, it is a city-state with some outlands. All the wealth goes to the city, then all the brains go to the city because that's where the money, jobs and commodities are. The only way this could possibly ever change is if parliament was permanently moved to the north, forcing parliamentarians to care about northern infrastructure.
@@yurisei6732 Just a wild guess: "Encourage" in this case means government putting in incentives, such as investing in these areas.
As a German, I want to congratulate you on pronouncing "Wohnbaugenossenschaften" pretty well.
Next step: Saying "Wohnungsbaugenossenschaften", which is the term used in Germany.
(wohnen = to live, to reside | Wohnung = flat, appartment)
you might be interested in bridport's co-housing development. people are already living there and though iv only heard about it twice, seen it's own vids, it looks like a successful project. I wish i'd known there were people like that when i lived in bridport 15+ yrs ago XD
EDIT; i believe that something like 60% of the british/uk land is owned by 1% of the people, the aristocracy in particular.
Poundbury (the new chaotic monstrosity of an eyesore clash of non-compatible architectural designs when u are actually there in person) on the outskirts of dorchester is owned by king charles from when he was the prince in waiting. Every house/business on that land has to pay rent to him. All they have bought is the bricks n mortar of the buildings
the systemic changes must come first. Without it any project and big investment will be a drop in a bucket doomed to evaporate or be sucked up in the name of profit.
2 other things I'm concerned about with uk land and housing is
1. There are thousands of houses and buildings that are empty in the uk.
2. We only make like 40 smth percent of our food is produced here.
At the end of the day it comes down to Economics. The UK is in a similar position as much of the rest of the developed world. Aging population, aging infrastructure that needs maintenance and replacement.
Due to demographics (read, population bubble) our societies are inevitably structure to cater to the needs of that plurality who also control the largest portion of the wealth. Most of our societies more or less eradicated senior poverty that was common in our great grand parents' generations, but at the cost of younger people's wellbeing.
Additionally, we have a spiral of negative feedback loops. A huge amount of seniors that require outside care and soak up social resources while contributing nothing compounded by aging infrastructure and institutions that need repair, maintenance, and revitalization. That takes A LOT OF money and resources at a time when there are fewer and fewer young people of prime working age to fuel the taxbase. Oh, and also, global politics and the global economy is rougher and more competitive than it has been in decades. Maybe ever.
What do you do? It's not as simple as opening the floodgates on immigration. Immigration is one small necessary component, but it has to be used as a tool in your nation/society like anything else. Immigrants by and large can bring in lots of unskilled labor to your country, but that isn't what is needed right now. You need architects, engineers, power plant operators, nurses and healthcare professionals, teachers, etc. Lots of skilled labor. It takes a generation or two for immigrants to start producing those kinds of people. If you go too much too fast you can easily just create yet another societal underclass as there aren't resources available to integrate the huge swathes of unskilled labor and people of a foreign culture into your society/workfroce, etc. Obviously this also creates a huge amount of social unrest as well if you are literally importing and creating social underclasses and not integrating them.
What is needed is lots of skilled labor. These problems will not be fixed in our generation as they are largely a demographic/generational issue. Right now, since there is no plan, they will only continue to get worse. What is actually needed are programs that make having families and educating and training a competent workforce affordable and practical.
house building is a red herring, while the housing crisis has worsened, the housing surplus has increased. The issue isn't having enough houses, it is that no one can afford to live in them. The real problems include removing protections for tenants (such as rent controls) and protecting the interests of landlords, and the right to buy legislation which has massively reduced the social housing stock. A good book came out recently about this called "against landlords - How To Fix The Housing Crisis" I really recommend reading it if you're interested in the topic, even if you don't agree with it.the arguments, it gives a really good history of housing policy in the UK, (most shocking to me was that less than 10% of houses were privately rented in the UK in the 1950s!!)
Thre real proboem is the massive population growth every year from immigration. Over 1 million people a year who all need to live somewhere.
Love this video so much. This is exactly what we're trying to do here on Kalapuya Land, Eugene, Oregon USA. A free solarpunk community third space fablab flex hub that can help address housing, food, climate, and more. Our town is number 1 for homeless per capita in the US. Nonprofit community land trusts indeed seem like one of the most potent frameworks. So exciting & encouraging to see the collective solarpunk vision(s) emerging globally!
I wish development in America was planned at all... instead of an endless sprawl of suburbs and walmarts
Ah, but that was planned. That isn't an accident, it is deliberate.
That's all planned. It's called Euclidean zoning.
Great video, really quite comprehensive. The only thing I would add is that the UK has tons of property that could be lived in but isn't for purely economic reasons.
A problem in my humble opinion is that fact that people are reluctant to actually live where the land and the housing is cheap. Rural areas are dying while the big cities just keep growing. That takes a change of culture and mindset to change or maybe even just economical necessity.
Just wanted to say thank you towards the thought and detail put into this video over a topic your clearly passionate about. The applicability being one of many positives of it, as I'm a local born and raised in Hawai'i and couldn't help my attention being drawn every time you mentioned an issue you guys have been having over housing or whatever.
The reactionary sentiment towards outsiders, the lack of supply and demand created by economic incentives, go's to show how helpful your vid and the info overall could be to plenty others! ^w^
Thanks so much!
Love the video, but one thing I will say is that we shouldn't build houses with shared kitchens. Truly nothing would stir up more hate in a community than that. But I like the idea of a shared community area, such as parks, living space (games rooms, bars/cafe, etc). Basically need to build communities around the idea of somewhere in which you can use if you want, but not one that you have to use.
People who think windmills are ugly don't look at the long-term effects of fossil fuels on plants.
I love this vision for the future. I don't think we need to build more homes in most of the developed world, but renovate the ones we have to make them more eco-symbiotic. Here in the US I think empty homes outnumber the unhoused 24:1 and they're still building more. Urban sprawl is barely existent on a global scale, as all cities, towns and roads cover only 1% of the land surface. Nature has more opportunity to really return on the 42% of our planet devoted to farming and feeding animals... as well as in the ocean where we unalive a further 3 trillion animals annually... most of whom we feed to farmed animals. If we just ate plants instead of animals, we could easily bring back nature more than any other combination of approaches combined.
Across the pond, the Netherlands laughs at the UK, thinking it's overpopulated. Don't get me wrong, I think we can probably house a lot more people, but we're probably the most solarpunk countries in the world. And I'm not exaggerating-after all, we reclaimed land to expand our capacity to house people.
Still, even the Netherlands has issues with housing. It's not because of lack of space, but because we have solarpunked so hard that technology hasn't come up with a solution for nitrogen pollution yet. The rest of the world deals with carbon dioxide and methane, while we can't make a bucket of cement [hyperbole] without considering how we're contributing to the nitrogen in the atmosphere.
Honestly, though, it could be really cool if the UK reached out to the Netherlands to reclaim some of the land from the ocean that the UK has lost over the past two millennia.
The Netherlands has housing problems for the same reason as the UK: Housing is an investment, and the value of investments go up faster than inflation, by definition. If it didn't, it wouldn't get any investors.
What happens if houses keep getting more expensive faster than inflation/income increases?Then each generation will be able to invest a smaller percentage of income in their house.
(Sidenote: inflation and income are coupled in NL because the Unions negotiate wages to at least match inflation)
FYI The nitrogen problem isn't about the air, the air doesn't care about more Nitrogen compounds. Elementary Nitrogen (N2) is harmless, and the biologically relevant Nitrogen compounds (NH3 and NO3) are water soluble, so rain will pull them out of the air. The problem with Nitrogen comes from the ground water, and even then only near the nature reserves. And even that wouldn't be as big a problem if NL hadn't promised the EU they would improve the quality of those nature reserves in exchange for EU funding. Taking money and then not delivering on your part of the deal is a bit of an issue.
We just waste too much space on agriculture in the Netherlands. Half of the country is agricultural land, most of which is used for livestock which is mainly exported. Agriculture only represents a small percentage of the Dutch economy and an even smaller percentage of the job market.
This is one of the best videos I've seen on the topic. It's easy to integrate nature with housing. There need not be a false dichotomy.
Of course we can have enough space for nature and housing. People just didn't plan any of this shit out when we were expanding and industrializing
So many landlords are turning to shortterm/holiday lets because changes in taxes have meant it is barely profitable to rent long-term. Air BnB is far more work, either for them or for someone they pay to manage it but it’s far more profitable.
The algorithm showed this to me. Very happy it did 🎉
And yet they keep closing shops , libraries and supermarkets for more flats. All this houses who's gonna live in them especially with how expensive London and other areas of England has become. Ridiculous
Homeless people are homeless by their own choice:
Choice to not study hard enough at school
Choice to not work hard enough their whole life IN HIGHER EDUCATION DEMANDING WORK POSITION
Choice to drink alcohol
Choice to take drugs
Choice to commit illegal activity
Choice to make bad life choices in general
Choice to not think about the future when they were young
Choice to not get a job that pays well enough (just study more!)
This applies to ALL countries/cities/places on earth
You need density to make service provision economically viable.
The wind turbines thing, there are versions out there that don't kill birds, I wish we'd move to that model instead. I can understand the view thing though, it's weird driving through fields of them, feels alien sometimes if they are the only thing out there. Also, world population drops everywhere world wide but at the same time housing crisis everywhere too.... The main thing is trying to get people back into places outside major cities, once farming no longer became such a big deal, there was less reason for people to live out in places that had more housing as jobs where more rare then.
Keep up the great work.
:)
Great video as ever, and as an unemployed 24 year old in the UK the talk about lacking housing certainly speaks to me 😅
I was wondering how you feel about the production of sustainable energy resources such as wind. I've always been very pro-green energy, but as I've read more about the Democratic Republic of the Congo and how cobalt mining is extorting and killing an entire population, I've found myself at a loss. Wind turbines use cobalt for their magnets, solar panels use it, and I'm sure if I looked into the other metals and materials being used to make these things I'd find a similar bloody path. How do we push for a green world when our technologies are painting other nations red with blood? Are our renewable energy supplies really renewable if we must use unrenewable resources to harvest them? Do we have any humane alternatives?
The answer is don't think about it. The prosperity of the UK depends upon the exploitation of other nations. That's unavoidable. The UK is a value-adding economy, not a natural resource producer, which means we live off the profit generated by taking natural resources from poor countries and selling them as manufactured goods to rich countries. If we stopped all the exploitation that fuels the UK economy, our living standards would crash so low that we wouldn't have any electricity at all, let alone a debate between cobalt-reliant wind turbines or gas-reliant power plants.
This is the big problem in utopic imagination. We like to pretend that the whole world can be just as happy and healthy as the Norwegians, but they can't. Our above-average wellbeing is directly related to other countries having below-average wellbeing. An equal world would be the average global wellbeing, not the peak wellbeing Brits have today. So, it's best not to think about it.
I disagree with Yuri Sei. We absolutely need to think about this stuff. With enough investment in infrastructure and training we can recycle the rare earth metals these technologies depend on and end the cycle of exploitation. Developed countries like the UK absolutely have the capital to change this situation so we need to create mass movements capable of forcing our governments hand. With enough political will we can have both renewable technology and the end of neocolonialist and extractivist capitalism.
@@DownTheStream That's not how finite resources work.
@@yurisei6732 We already have the technology to recycle rare earth metals, what are you talking about
@@DownTheStream Recycling does not create more resources. It's not magic. It just reduces the amount of the resource lost over time - the resource is still finite, which means if you distribute access to it evenly, everyone's amount decreases over time as the population grows and resources are sequestered from the cycle of reuse.
Danish style Cohousing is total SolarPunk 🙏🌍🌱
the problem with all of this and what is happening at the moment. we KNOW HOW to solve all of our issues. we can AFFORD all of these if we spent wisely and taxed people equally.
BUT.... the people at the top just decide not to.
Just come up to Scotland 👍 lots of space and green areas
something ive noticed is that when you apply a top down approach in an attempt to build more progressive housing developments nimbyism comes out in droves, but in countries that have the poltical infrastructure to build things from the ground up (the peoples decision) they tend to just get on with it, as that system allows from the community to actually be involved with the project (and benefit) directly, SUDDENLY their anxiety about their housing investment, green space, migration simply go out the window when they're no longer worried about the money in their back pocket (main countries to use for example would be denmark, switzerland and surprisingly enough, japan) these countries have their problems obviously but their ability to just build quality infrastructure without 10 years of arguing before a single shovel hits the ground is admirable (copenhagen is close to finishing a tramway 27km in length that they started in 2018 BECAUSE of this system as before construction began they put together what i believe was called the "copenhagen suburban co-operative" not sure if that was the exact name but co-operative is in there... because you know... these things require.... CO-OPERATION??)
7 years may sound like awhile to build 27km of track but when you also throw in 18months of covid lockdown it is extremely impressive
Wish we would build a load of earthships, they're very labour intensive but the bulk of that is just pounding earth into tires, the skilled part presumably not more than a conventional house. I'm sure a lot of people on benefits would be interested to get involved if it was a well facilitated community experience. Then of course you could give sentences for minor crimes rather than short custodial sentences.
The thing is they call these recent style homes on these horrible scabby new developments, all sealed up air tight and made out of the latest polystyrene or whatever "passive homes."
Its such a joke compared to earth ships that have actual passive heating and cooling from solar gain and thermal mass, as well as actual decent air quality even if your battery bank or complex air filtration fails...
Of course from many angles earth ships are just green roof mounds and very well integrated into the natural aesthetics of a landscape.
They are pretty cool (pun intended), but they're low density housing, which means infrastructure gets expensive. All those kilometers of pipes, wires, and roads need to be maintained. So they have their place but 're not the only thing we should be building. You're going to want a lot of medium and high density housing as well.
Earthships are awesome! I forgot to mention them in this video, which is silly, because I read the book ‘Architecture and Anarchism’ a few months ago and it had so many cool examples of them.
Earthships aren't that good in temperate climates. They work well for warm climates, though.
But we might consider bringing back the traditional European pit house. Sadly, it comes with its own problems and will definitely not be for everybody.
@@solarpunkalana earth ships are a specific form of passive housing using high quantities of mass (earth) to get thermal benefits rather than using low mass structures and high energy inputs. High mass / passive architecture can be planned in many other forms too. This includes mid-rise and mixed uses. The low mass/ high energy inputs buildings worked for the housing developers, profiteers. UK needs a way to incentivise high mass / low energy buildings.
@@johannageisel5390 OK so what are the actual issues with earthships in temperate climates in your understanding? "Not good" in comparison to what?
Obviously you adjust the details according to the location, Michael Reynolds has built "earthships" in various climates some that look completely different to serve different priority's and taking inspiration from various traditional styles of buildings.
What about the design or management can't reasonably be adapted?
Let's just go with the standard south facing windows and north side earth bank principle, what's to sniff about the benefits to this style in UK for instance?
Offshore Wind turbines are an option. Otherwise, renewables have many alternatives. Hydro, solar, and then there's tidal/wave energy.
However, only someone who has all the facts about what land/sea areas are available, what the costs are (though environmentally friendly should be more important than mere financial costs), and how effective a particular solution would likely be, how much maintanence it would require etc... only somehow with all those facts can really make a good decision. And whoever believes they are in possession of such facts, should share them, rather than imposing their will.
I think wind turbines are pretty neat but I’m not sure they are are the best option for renewables. Generally I’m against massive grid scale installations of renewables on land that could be nature or something else. I’m much more in favor of solar and wind being erected on existing buildings and other developed spaces and keeping our open spaces free of that sort of thing not to mention the environmental impacts on wildlife. Here in the US there is more than enough roof space or other developed space to erect solar and wind. The other issue I’ve heard with wind is the sound generated which apparently can make people sick from what I’ve heard though I do not know for sure. There is apparently though wind technology that is either small scale turbine style or what I’ll call steady state being worked on which may solve many of the objections to wind. Here in the US I think small scale renewables are the best option for off grid and what I’ll call end grid applications meaning houses located far outside of cities where the houses powered per mile of power lines decreases significantly. Solar and wind are great for on building applications in cities to help compensate for energy but the other issue is battery storage which needs to be significantly increased to fully power the grid off these types of renewables. A better option and increasingly better and safer is nuclear in my opinion. It takes up far less land per unit of energy. It’s very safe and is capable of providing base power very efficiently. Additionally some newer models of reactor being worked on like the molten salt reactor may well increase fuel utilization to 90+% versus the less than 5% or so it currently is. Waste heat from molten salt reactors could also be used for district heating and more importantly in my opinion for CO2 capture technologies and conversion of that CO2 into carbon neutral fuels or chemical feedstocks to power industry and transportation utilizing much of our existing petrochemical infrastructure to ease the transition to green energy while still retaining many of the benefits of carbon based fuels. With transportation we could also work on modifying existing carbon based fuel cells to be used in vehicles thus boosting fuel efficiency 2-3 fold and eliminating other pollutants like nox and Sox that could be formed in ICEs and also reducing the weight and quantity of batteries for what would be carbon based hybrid electric vehicles. Electric vehicles work great for some applications and will no doubt improve with better battery technology reducing weight and increasing safety and range capacity. Currently however electric vehicles are very heavy causing more damage to roadways and potentially causing more damage in car accidents. Lithium battery tech is dangerous when damaged. And range is limited especially when traveling through low population areas like the central US. Many of these problems will be solved as time progresses but the advantages of liquid fuel especially when paired with a fuel cell and smaller battery would no doubt be enormous.
Thanks for the detailed comment! Lots of interesting points. For sure the ‘which energy’ debate is something that’s always ongoing. To be honest I haven’t made my mind up about nuclear, and I do think a mixture of renewables is probably the best bet for the UK (wind, solar, hydro, etc). I think sometimes renewables can be integrated into nature - ie offshore wind turbines make great fish nurseries and solar panels in a field can be combined with a wildflower meadow or cattle/sheep grazing for food.
Wind power doesn't scale down well. It's in the physics. Power output is proportional to the radius squared, and the wind speed cubed. If you build the turbine twice as wide you get four times the power. Build it a little taller to get higher wind speed and you get a lot more power. Little toy-turbines on someone's roof are basically worthless for energy generation, though they have a niche in off-grid applications. Wind power means building as big as you can. There is one up-side: The turbines don't actually take up much land, only the area of the tower, so they can share land very easily with agriculture. Turbines above, crops below.
Photovoltaics though, they scale down great. You can and should stick those up everywhere. Every empty roof space is a potential site for solar panels.
Solar is generally better (more efficient) and also more decentralize-able. That's why oligarchs prefer wind (or also large solar "farms"): because they can attempt to keep direct control on the sources of energy (and the money they produce).
@@vylbird8014 fair enough I was not aware of the math on wind but that makes sense. I think wind is better for off grid and end grid anyway where the battery storage capacity problem would be much more manageable. But I do recognize they can make sense to put up in some places crop fields etc. another thing I have considered is that some places are better suited to generation of energy via various renewables. Some areas are especially windy or sunny or are located near geothermal features that would make sense to put them there more than anywhere else. So maybe if in the case of wind we are putting them only in areas of the highest return then maybe that’s the happy medium we need though as I said earlier I have also heard of steady state wind being developed which may be better since it solves issues like the bird strike problem and infrasound from the rotating blades if we can make it work and be scaleable.
@@LuisAldamiz makes sense to me monopolies and oligopolies are something we certainly need to address. The two solutions would be either trust busting to increase competition and pushing for more decentralized power or that large scale power generation maybe should just be publicly owned and nonprofit. Or both.
0:44 i literally just made myself tea 😭
🍵
The UK has already got more empty housing the unhoused people. Its not a problem that will be solved building houses but via policy.
How many people can the UK hold?
Amazing video!
thank you!
i think i would describe my caravan as solar punk, its autonomous in water, electricity and nearly there in gas,food sort of(the calories are there but i'm not a vegan) there is 50watts of solar in the roof that runs light music, laptop and a pump, as well as a 2 square meter solar water heater, and wood burner chimney with a copper pipe wrapped round it, when i pump water from a clear box with a plastic to the roof i can make hot water either with sun or fire, in my back yard i have 300square meter garden with ponds full of azolla and a poly-culture of of perennial cabbage, jerusalum artichoke, comfrey, rubarb and a rediculas number of other stuff growing together. the point of which is to feed a methane digester whats built out of a wheel bin with a recycle box floating upside down in it, the holes in the box are blocked so as to enable gas collection the bin is heated to 36 DEGREES by a hose pipe filled with hot water that is coiled through the bottom of it (the heat coming either from the solar thermal heater or the coil of copper pipe wrapped round the chimney ) the garden is saturated with leaf area and HARVESTED AT THE RATE OF GROWTH, this mean that i can fill the bin with shredded material + cow manure and collect gas from it, the gas is sufficient to do cooking on, so the energy i use is home brew, the water i use is collected off the roof and filtered, i also have a 250w wind turbine for winter power, and a bikegenerator. most of what i'm doing is in the book "Radical Technology (1976 book)" i highly recommend you read it :) especially page 137.
We have plenty of nature, it's just hijacked by private entities. Only 10% of the entire country is actually developed land (and that includes parks and managed green spaces) only about 8% is built on.
If all the communal services are free, who does the maintenance? Volunteers?
Either that or it gets subsidised
Comment to help with the algorithm, this deserves to be seen by more people
thank you!
It makes sense if you factor in the fact that existing landlords are afraid of competition. "Save the environment" is an excuse.
Landlords shouldn't exist.
This was worded so well 7:25
People who complain that we shouldn't build more housing... what is your plan for how to house people, then? People should live in what? Tents in the forest?
No one has ever given me an argument on to why such a small nation needs that many people in it.
You can’t even grow enough food to eat for the people that are already there let alone more immigrants.
Because it already has that many people in it and murder is generally considered unethical.
@@yurisei6732 no one suggested to murder anybody so I don’t know why that is your fetish.
Still no argument
The people already exist and continue to procreate, albeit at a lower rate than before. What exactly is your argument? If you don't elaborate or offer a solution it's not unreasonable to assume you mean depopulation of some kind.
Land lords shouldn't exist. 1 home for every person.
Growing up i never thoguht i would be radicalized but here we are.
First, I generally like your idea of popularizing the idea that housing and nature are valid combinations. however, i feel like your solution section is more of a problem description than an actual solution. I think it is incredibly difficult to put houses closer to amenities, and while I agree with the goal, just saying it needs to be done is not a solution. still had some good ideas
you will never have trouble finding somewhere to rent, seem exactly the type a landlord would want as a tenant
Personally I'm not too enthusiastic about the landscape being plastered with skyscraper wind turbines. I imagine that the micro hydro route in combination with serious strategic rejuvenation of the landscape hydrology and watershed patterns should be a more integrated solution to multiple issues to do with water supply, drought, floods, soil carbon, bioremediation ect. Energy storage by pumping water back up to higher catchments and generating again by releasing it back down ect.
They have generally wanted very high catchments with long drops for hydro storage, there probably a lot of technical considerations, but I like to think on scale with a smarter grid a series of smaller catchments overflows and spillways would be viable in conjunction with other the other benefits.
Honestly though I don't like the idea of plastering huge wind turbines everywhere, they don't last forever. Certainly not until there is a more genuine emphasis on the reality that there is no real substitute for using less overall active energy, and that really we don't need to consume nearly so much to live healthy, happy, reasonably modern lives.
A truly vast amount of solar energy drives the hydrological cycle of course...
I'm sad so few are interested in these things. I really miss my dog...
The first step to success is SEO videos. So SEO the videos. Then you can be successful very quickly
You know what's even better geothermal energy! Geothermal energy is much better beautywise
But not viable except where the crust is thin.
I love your channel
thank you! :)
8:24 I'd like to point out that of course the small boats problem is an inflammatory one, it isn't particularly relevant for the concerns over net migration. People who come legally still need homes, jobs, and food.
Net migration in the year ending June 2023 was about 880,000, approximately 1.2% of the UK's population. The 1.5 million homes figure that Labour has proposed won't even cover net migration since the end of lockdown.
Very lucid
We need skyscrapers in the middle of farm fields. Close to where things are produced and not having to be shipped.
Heck yeah YIMBYism!
I sometimes forget that marxism largely developed in the UK. More capitalism inevitably builds anti capitalist sentiments.
It’s just like in Pom Poko
12:35 "...to invite wildlife into our living dpaces" tell me you're a privileged city girl without telling me you're a privileged city girl.
I live in a rural area (SE europe) with a farm and insects are one of if not the worst thing about the summer. The moment it gets cool in the evening and you open the window (we don't have AC) the mosquitos come rushing in and then have a feast on you and you can't sleep the whole night because of the buzzing. Wasps, spiders, centipedes etc. aren't very lovey dovey either. I'll be working outside and then just randomly feel pain, itching and see swelling and reddnes because something bit/stung me, but I don't know what.
You live in a fantasy. Go to any person who actually lives in nature (and + if they work there too) and they'll confirm artificial protections are very much liked and preffered to "nature"
Apartments:
Make the buildings earth tone browns
It’s refreshing to hear content that is not anti immigrant. There are more displaced people now than ever before (200 million). Conditions for many are shocking. Helping them resettle is the moral issue of our time. Yet the overwhelming sentiment seems to be hate and resentment. Thank you for taking a more positive attitude.
The yookay is forked haha. Let it rot.
Provide OF
You seem extremely expressive and emplathic, making you very expressive in your motions.
However, this translates really bad on video and makes you look very twitchy,
Have you considered public speaking where this is a boon?
Otherwise, on video, please be a bit less moving? It's really weird on camera. Perhaps even just making it look as if you're talking to a group in a place rather then a camera?
Watching this video id defo want to see the conspiracy theories surrounding solarpunk and capitalism
BIPOC is a bad term to use in the British context.
"British Indigenous People of Colour"? ... I'm now picturing the Cheddar Man.
Good point. Do you have any suggestions as to what would be a more relevant term? BAME or POC?
I'd stick to people of colour, BAME was never a popular term and is no longer used by most institutions.
What exactly is bad about the Term?
I'm not British, so maybe it has a meaning there that I'm not aware of?
@@solarpunkalana The best option is to not bundle everyone together as if it's "whites" vs the world, especially since the group in Britain that receives the most bigotry is Romani, who would generally be classed as white. Romani, Irish Travellers, Poles, Hindus, black people, Chinese people, Muslims, they all have very different experiences in the UK and can't be lumped together in any useful way.
Still surprising to me that some of us outside the system actually think it would be a good idea, or even want, houses to be packed even more closely together. I'm already living nose to anus with all my neighbors I'm not sure how much closer it can get. You can't open your window without looking into your neighbor's. We need yards and Forest and streams around our housing. Does that mean longer roads and commutes? Absolutely. That's what buses are for. Our Distribution Systems wouldn't be even remotely taxed by a four fold increase in the size of the suburbs around any city.
First video watched by you here. As an American, I have to give some apology. The further rise of white supremacy has to have, in some part, been because of our previous elected Supreme leader.
It saddens me that it's happening in your backyard as well.
Great video!