RUN!
Yolande Barnes Consulting & Space Syntax
The Race to solve the housing poly-crisis
Unaffordability, inaccessibility, fuel poverty, low amenity, unhealthy places and nature-decline combine into a 'wicked’ problem requiring a radical, multidisciplinary approach to solve.
To deliver the homes and places we want, at speed, we need to RUN!
‘Regenerative Urban Neighbourhood’ principles have many applications, including multifamily housing and bare-land developments. But we think the most important is to optimise land-use in existing places. Additional homes, added amenities and a better environment can be provided to homeowners in already-serviced but low-density, low-intensity, suburban neighbourhoods.
RUN! is a framework for community control, capable of adding all forms of value. Individuals retain ownership of their homes but separate and pool their land using digital technology. Tokens are created using blockchain to embody land value at 25% of the home’s open-market value.
Individual owners have shares in the RUN and buy back their land tokens over a 50-year period. This creates an income stream enabling the RUN to raise finance from private investors. RUNs could fund maintenance, manage neighbourhoods, undertake environmental retrofit and, with Developing Partners, undertake regenerative redevelopment for collective benefit. There is potential for genuinely ‘bottom-up’, co-created, community-built and self-procured initiatives (and profits) to be realised.
If this new type of development industry is created, our models show: housing doubled, cheaper homeownership, improved environment, developer and householder profits. We can grow the economy in locations that wouldn’t otherwise be capable of conventional development. The economic model IS the design.
Yolande Barnes Consulting
Yolande Barnes
Space Syntax
Tim Stonor, Architect
Artem Stepanov, Urban Designer
Helen Cheon, Graphic Designer
Anna Rose, Advisor
Ed Parham, Advisor