1. ODPM live tables of Housing Statistics, Table 204 Housebuilding: permanent dwellings started and completed by tenure in England, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and posted on www.odpm.gov.uk

2. 'Total Housing Completions in Great Britain 1920 to 2001', DTLR Housing Statistics 2001, and posted on www.dtlr.gov.uk

3. 'Sustainable Communities - Building for the future', London, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, 2003, and posted on www.odpm.gov.uk

4. David M. Gann, Building Innovation: Complex constructs in a changing world, Thomas Telford, London, 2000, page 94

5. Adam Mornement, 'Modular Muddle', The Guardian, 20 November 2002, and posted on www.guardian.co.uk

6. James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki, Japanese lessons on customer-focused housebuilding - Report of a Department of Trade and Industry Expert Mission, Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, Brighton, 2001, page 13

7. Rosy Strati, 'Module and prefabrication - History and present-day of modular spaces', Materia, number 40, an issue on modular architecture, April 2003, page 96 to 107, available through www.materia.it

8. Kisho Kurokawa, edited by Dennis Sharp, From the Age of the Machine to the Age of Life Bookart, London, 1998, page 63

9. Charles Jencks, 'Kurokawa's double vision: from Metabolism to Fractals', in Kisho Kurokawa, edited by Dennis Sharp, From the Age of the Machine to the Age of Life, Bookart, London, 1998, page 37

10. Kisho Kurokawa, 'Non-Bourbakian systems', in Kisho Kurokawa, edited by Dennis Sharp, From the Age of the Machine to the Age of Life, Bookart, London, 1998, page 258

11. David M. Gann, Building Innovation: Complex constructs in a changing world, Thomas Telford, London, 2000, page 150

12. David M. Gann, 'Construction as a manufacturing process ? Similarities and differences between industrialised housing and car production in Japan', Construction Management and Economics, Issue 14 1996, page 437 to 450

Time to build a fresh, non-nimby approach to boosting new housing

In The Times of 30 January 2004 James Woudhuysen argued that we should have more stigma-free prefabricated homes. We reprint the article, announcing the publication of his book - Why is construction so backward?

Kate Barker's final report on the supply of houses in this country, commissioned by Gordon Brown and due in the spring, comes not a moment too soon. With continuing divorce rates and the average age of first-time buyers moving from the late twenties rising to the early thirties, Britain seems faced with many years of house-price inflation - whatever the prospects of a slowdown in the market in 2004.

Of course, more than weak supply lies at the root of the high cost of new houses, old houses and - by far the biggest component of the building trade - the refurbishment of old houses. Money has not favoured equities until relatively recently, so investing in homes, and in particular the buy-to-let market, has had a lot going for it.

Nevertheless, the state of housing supply tells us a lot about the lack of innovation in the building trade. We are building 130,000 new homes a year in England. (1) In the 1960s, the annual national total for all forms of tenure exceeded 400,000. (2)

A lack of commitment in the Labour 'commitment' of a decent home for all

Government housing ministers themselves berate builders for not moving into mass production. But this is so much rhetoric. A close look at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister's White Paper, Sustainable Communities: Building for the Future, published in February, reveals that very little of the £22 billion housing "programme" announced then is actually devoted to building new homes. (3) About £4 billion is to be spent on affordable housing, and £1 billion on the key- worker housing beloved of the London Mayor, Ken Livingstone; but the rest is being spent mainly on refurbishing old public housing stock, demolition and land clearance and, significantly, a Regional Development Agency bureaucracy of funds administrators, a layer of Arms Length Management Organisations (ALMOs), and various social engineering schemes.

John Prescott's £22 bn - 3 year job creation scheme

Social engineering, indeed, seems to be the main purpose of government housing policy, along with saving the planet, and measuring everything that moves on a construction site.

It is a bizarre system of priorities, and very different from what the Japanese are up to. (See box below) Toyota's factory at Kasugai alone mass-produced 3,500 large, spacious, homes in 2002, and it is only one of three run by the group's construction arm. By contrast, the Sustainable Communities initiative plans just 16,000 new homes a year, of which perhaps 4,000 will be prefabricated.

Michael Caine was right to hate the prefab in which he spent his childhood in the post-war years. But 50 years on, new technology makes prefabs a completely different proposition. Looking at the customised componentry in Japan and in the world motor industry, there seems little to worry about. The issue with UK housing supply is not so much technical, nor even economic, as political.

In thrall to nimbyish green pressure groups, the Government believes that Britain's green and pleasant land is being overrun by suburbanising working-class families.

According to its chief adviser, Lord Rogers, building brownfield cities such as Birmingham up to London housing densities is preferable to allowing a town such as Milton Keynes to expand. But why? Towns bigger than 10,000 people account for 80 per cent of Britain's population, but just 7 per cent of its land mass. As Kate Barker hinted, the planning system is a nonsense. In the naturalistic perspective dominating thinking about UK construction, this country needs more and more regulation to protect itself from property developers who hoard precious land, and environmental police to ensure all new buildings are interrogated over their relatively miniscule carbon emissions.

There is, though, an alternative.

We should denationalise the right to develop land and encourage mass production. We can also develop the fast-track Local Authority National Type Approval Consortium. LANTAC (as part of the Local Authority Building Control service) already controls the safety of buildings in England and Wales: why not let it extend its Type Approvals to the advance planning approval of whole buildings?

No more endless public inquiries. The price of land and of houses would come down. Foreign investors interested in British locations would find them a lot easier to build on.

London's key workers could buy prefabricated, customised, swing-more-than-a-cat macroflats of their own, instead of being forced into tied government microflats.

Is that too much to ask, or must we continue the current inflationary policy of make-do-and-mend? James Woudhuysen 30 January 2004

Japanese Macrohouses

In the 1950s and 1960s, Japan's major cities grew furiously and with little planning. In the 20 years up to the 1980s the area of densely inhabited districts increased 2.6 times; the population of these districts, 1.7 times. By the 1980s land was scarcer than ever in Tokyo and Osaka. Land costs were high, but began to fall after the early 1990s - despite continuing urbanisation. (4) In the face of all this, the Japanese continually developed their housing industry to achieve better land use while satisfying customer demands.

Arguments for industrial solutions to housing have been made many times before. Today it is also necessary to argue against people who would sacrifice space standards for architectural design. People need and are right to expect large, high-quality accommodation in adequate supply. Yet talented designers today seem willing to deliver quality only by abandoning production in quantity and in size. It is bad enough that housing shortages inflate the price of living space. It is worse still when architects respond with the naturalistic prejudice that urban space is so precious, people should have less of it.

In fact, behind the official endorsement of microflats is a subterranean love-in with Japan; not with its real, contemporary and worthwhile advances in prefabrication, but rather with a Westernised image of a pre-Hiroshima Japan. In the London Guardian, Adam Mornement rightly noted that, just as one in two Finns lives in houses built in factories and bolted together on-site, so Japan's fashionable urban elite regards prefabricated buildings as some of the most desirable on the market.' (5) In their fine report Japanese lessons on customer-focused housebuilding, James Barlow and Ritsuko Ozaki properly celebrate how Japanese prefabrication means choice and value:

'The major housebuilders invest very substantial resources in maintaining and updating their housing products. Typically a Japanese housebuilder offers up to 300 standard designs in terms of elevations and floor plans, which can then be adapted by the customer. Although the accent is on offering a wide variety of choice in order to allow designs to be tailored, this mainly relates to floor plans and internal specification. Exteriors can be varied depending on the size and shape of the plot, along with customer needs and building and planning regulations. However exterior choices are more restricted than interior choices, so that economies of scale can be achieved in relation to cladding treatments, door and window sizes and designs, and balcony types.' (6)

But the lessons popularisers of the microflat take from Japan are rarely about their desirability or the ease with which they can be customised. They are, instead, about how it's cool to follow the Japanese and live small.

Kisho Kurokawa's Nakagin Capsule Tower of 1970 in Tokyo is often cited as setting the right, miniaturised example. It is often claimed that '... the intention was to make residents return from the suburbs to central Tokyo'. (7) Or that Kurokawa was about 'packing people into flexible 'capsule' dwellings and offices'. (8) But the analogy is entirely wrong. Kurokawa's idea was to provide Japanese employees with capsules in town additional to their homes in the country. Far from a cut in Japanese living space, Kurokawa had in mind its expansion:

'When residential areas in Tokyo started to shift to the suburbs, [the Kurokawa initiative] was intended to be one tactical move to restore housing units to the central part of the city and to provide those who commute to the centre from the outlying area with studios, an extra bedroom or a place for social activities.'

Kurokawa had no concept of urban key workers deserving just family-unfriendly accommodation. Initially, at least, his capsules were a symptom of increasing prosperity; by contrast, new-century British microflats have come into the world as morally-charged emergency housing.

Tied microflats are an employment trap for underpaid 'key workers'

Today, reading their prejudices backwards through history, environmentally-minded architects try to remould Kurokawa's old aesthetic-political movement of Metabolism into an early stab at sustainable architecture. Architectural historian Charles Jencks perceives 'a thread of development, a coherent line' in Kurokawa's career. (9) But Kurokawa's early work was machine-age architecture based on geometric mega-structural forms and massive infrastructure, not the sustainable sort. Kurokawa more accurately recognises that his pursuit of what he calls a 'philosophy of symbiosis' has been elaborated through the rise and transformation of environmentalism, particularly since the mid 1980s. (10)

Those who would have all Japan's explorations in design as a historic search for a kind of quietist balance between man and nature tell us a lot about themselves. They select for admiration not so much Japan's dynamic building technologies, but rather those leanings that are consonant with low consumption and slow economic growth.

As David Gann observes, much of the Japanese achievement was a consequence of applying IT to prefabrication:

'Evidence from Japanese industrialized housing production, where expert systems were used to coordinate millions of variables in component choice, indicated one way in which databases of standardised parts might be used… to improve the capabilities of designers and production engineers in delivering customised solutions.' (11)

There are both similarities and differences between Japan's production of houses and its production of cars. (12) But there can be no doubt that Japanese construction has drawn lessons from vehicle assembly. And not the least of those lessons is that prefabrication can be consistent with a degree of customisation. James Woudhuysen

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