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How Shall We Live?
dRMM joins Human Nature for collaborative thinking on building new towns
In July 2024, the UK government launched their vision for a ‘new generation of towns’ – a building project set to kickstart economic growth and improve the living standards of UK residents. The vision included an objective to build 1.5 million homes, creating “large-scale new communities across England” through the establishment of an independent New Towns Taskforce.
Less than a year later, dRMM has joined forces with a collective of built environment practitioners, invited by the Human Nature Foundation, to work together on a response to this national agenda. Titled How Shall We Live, Human Nature has authored a vision paper that includes ideas, designs, and content from this multi-disciplinary group. The paper sets out “practical, investable” approaches to reconsidering the role of large new settlements, including New Towns, within truly modern and sustainable economies and societies.
How Shall We Live was written following a series of collaborative workshops held over two months in the run up to the paper’s launch event at the end of April. Workshop topics ranged from macro considerations tied to urban densification and planning, to more detailed thoughts on materiality. The discussions and exchange from the workshops converted into fourteen themes within the paper, for which dRMM gave direct contribution to two.
For the chapter on ‘A place to start out in life, a place to stay’, dRMM produced sketch designs for a typology series of timber and bio-based homes. The typologies are intended to accommodate a blend of tenures and are designed to be predominantly manufactured off-site as rapid, modularly built homes.
Our team expanded on the homes’ manufacture strategy in the paper’s chapter titled ‘The 21st century transformative economy & community wealth’. For this we devised a flow diagram that unites industrialised timber manufacture with the introduction of on-site, community construction, introducing the idea of a communal barn that could host later stages of ‘raw and craft’ build. The marriage of the two construction streams intends to meet the scale and speed required for the new town housing target of 10,000 homes, whilst simultaneously building in community upskilling on site.
dRMM’s entire contribution is a practical, deliverable contemplation on building bio-based homes at scale—an ambition that sits at the core of Human Nature’s ethos as well as our own studio’s ongoing research focus.
The paper will be released by Human Nature and we will share it on our channels then. Its combined contributors include: Arup, AOMD, Architype, Ash Sakula, BE-ST, dRMM, Expedition Engineering, Eurban, Grant Associates, Heatherwick Studio, Hudson Architects, Material Cultures, Matter of Place Architects, New-works, Periscope, Ramboll, RUA and White Arkitekter.