High density housing: Lessons from Sweden

What (the hell) is contemporary Swedish residential architecture doing, amidst the foggy conditions of a late-capitalist, twenty-first century Welfare State, with a view to its construction booms and housing shortages? What are the demands that this architecture answers to, and what problems of its own might it be wrestling with? What forms of life does it dream of accommodating and which does it normalize, naturalize, or exclude? 14,495 Flats: A Metabolist’s Guide to New Stockholm examines the multi-unit housing approved at the height of a recent building boom (2017) in the midst of an ongoing housing shortage in the 26 municipalities that make up the Stockholm region.

Here in Melbourne, we are confronted with a similar apartment construction boom and recent public housing policies riddled with conflicting strategies. We invited international, local industry professionals and contributors from the book 14,495 Flats: A Metabolist’s Guide to New Stockholm to discuss the lessons learned from Sweden; a rare and necessary educational opportunity for the residential architecture industry in Australia.

The book 14,495 Flats: A Metabolist’s Guide to New Stockholm includes an archive of plans from 156 projects in the Stockholm region, presenting over 600 original planning permit drawings for 337 buildings. It is a must for all architects, planners, developers, and other actors working within the housing sector, as well as students and scholars of residential architecture.

Speakers
Helen Runting
Helen Runting is an architectural theorist (PhD. Arch.), urban planner (B. UPD), and urban designer (PG Dip. UD, MSc. UPD). Her work insists that another world is possible, and that an affirmative biopolitics - wherein bodies, minds, and environments are set in mutually supportive relation - is achievable. Drawing on critical theory and feminist scholarship, as well as an ongoing engagement with the politics of architecture under late capitalism, Helen writes critique, essays, and analyses of our shared architectural present.

Dr. Lee-Anne Khor
Lee-Anne is a senior lecturer at Monash University, where she is a key member of the Urban Lab. Her research focuses on the transformation of the established city and operates across the scales of building, precinct and region. She employs speculative design as tool for navigating the complex, and often conflicting, imperatives of urban regeneration and to enable complex stakeholder-inputs to be synthesised into integrative and strategic spatial policies. Lee-Anne has taught design and communication subjects at RMIT and Monash Universities and gained her professional registration working on a range of education, civic and residential projects. Most recently, she has been leading an inter-disciplinary study into the spatial morphology and potential for precinct-scaled renewal of suburban industrial centres.

Lisa Garner
Lisa Garner is a director of LIAN, an architecture practice seeking to expand people’s freedom to use, adapt and live in space as they see fit. Spanning architecture practice and research, Lisa has gained experience at leading studios and institutions in both Melbourne and Berlin. After graduating from Universität Der Künste, Berlin she worked for practices such as RaumlaborBerlin and Robertneun on award winning projects ranging from higher density housing to urban interventions. Lisa returned to Australia after winning Aecom’s 2018 International sustainability competition with a proposal for an alternative housing prototype for Melbourne’s middle ring suburbs. This work has shaped her passion for confronting the challenges of medium density housing in an Australian context in order to improve their environmental and s​ocial performance.

Alexis Kalagas
Alexis is Head of Public Programs at Molonglo, and leads an advanced architecture studies unit at MADA. Previously a foreign policy advisor with the Department of the Prime Minister & Cabinet, he worked on design and research projects across Europe, Latin America, and Africa with the Zürich-based practice Urban-Think Tank. He is the co-editor of the book Reactivate Athens: 101 Ideas (2017) and has pursued his interest in the complex economic, social, and technological forces reshaping our experience of urban space and the home as a Harvard GSD Richard Rogers Fellow and Future Architecture Fellow.

00:00 Welcome to Country and Intro
03:00 Lecture by Helen Runting and Rutger Sjögrim from SECRETARY
45:35 Panel discussion with guests Alexis Kalagas, Lisa Garner and Dr. Lee-Anne Khor
01:31:50 Final note