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the market for the 75 percent, as that is where the highest profit margins emerge for a
developer. Cheap first time buyer flats or student accommodation does not make profit in
the same manner. As a result, the richer in a way could subsidise the poorer or at least
guarantee that there are smaller and cheaper flats also entering the market. Such
smaller flats do not have to exceed 25m
2
.
Further down on the poverty line of the housing market, an approach as to ensuring low
costs could include the components described in one of the projects (UIA 1987: 24-25).
•
A step-by-step process to develop housing over time through a considerable
labour input from the owner in order to keep costs down.
•
A policy of using local labour and local materials to bring down costs.
•
A policy of area efficiency ensuring a size that fits the user’s needs and avoids
waste of space and hence money.
The competition’s winning entries were supposed to be built by individual governments
in the winners’ home countries. This did not happen and they remain mostly published in
the literature only (Fig. 2.)
Figure 2: One of the entries explored area efficiency, material use and the step-by-step process while
running all services by local renewable energy.
Drawing: Røstvik: The Sunshine Revolution, 1992, 128-129.
Another winner project example that could be applicable even in New York’s Times
Square or any other mega city centre, was a generic proposal. It pointed at a universal
solution, that of using the up to one metre wide available space between a building’s wall
and the large and often lit electric advertising boards that one finds in most cities to
house the homeless. The space between the private and the public and the question as
to who owns it, was at the core of this proposal. By making that available space
accessible through stairs and by slight improvement of the scaffolding already in place to
