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Thirdly, it should be located close to services and employment, so the occupants, often poor, have walking and cycling access and do not have to rely on cars or public transport. This means they are closer to the community of the ‘local village centres’, not cast out to the far-flung suburbs because the land is cheaper, but where it’s more expensive to live.
Tone Wheeler objects. But practitioners know it as a process. A gulf of understanding, which I want to illustrate with two words, normally seen as nouns, but if you flip them as verbs, they tell us a lot about how we should think of designing dwellings. The late Col James, as senior lecturer at Sydney University, was chair and coordinator of the I.B. Fell Housing Research Unit, critically looking at housing policy. The message on his answer phone ended with the exhortation to “make housing a verb”. Then, as now, our architecture media is full of ‘objects’, increasingly overblown hous...