3 Value List for Housing Presencing Architecture in view of KathKaCh'oolth

CS-01.1 Housing Presencing Architecture

This project is the moment of freedom of the architect when we begin. Planning for housing that addresses our housing culture crisis, a crisis at multiple dimensions of a lack of dwellings, poor quality dwellings, a massive gap in affordability and disregard for the environment, is freedom to represent values that we can (and should) dream of. The five areas below are not complete for creating a community of housing. They are points of contact and inflection to create housing as it needs to be. A project can bear an experiment, and that experiment is to prioritize these points in an approach for the rest will to follow properly. These are an impulse for unity with Nature, defining that water is not about plugging into a dysfunctional system and is about watersheds, filling the housing gap, community as connectivity with the wider population centres, with Indigenous knowledge, and how architecture forms unity in terms of housing’s context. They are strategic. If these are included, some things that are not mentioned will also have to come into play. They are going upend assumptions and they are going to cause certain factors to be rethought.

Kath Ka Ch'oolth from Mt Cokely, which might also be part of Kath Ka Ch'oolth. Source: from https://www.summitpost.org/mt-arrowsmith-from-mt-cokely/554937

MABR

The assembly of watersheds of the valleys at the base of Kath Ka Ch'oolth is called the Mount Arrowsmith Biosphere Region, or MABR. MABR is an area where the Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB) of UNESCO has ascertained that this biosphere that has humanity living in it is essentially intact. This biosphere is essentially 7+ watersheds. The essence of this project within MABR is to enhance the biosphere, to actually be as much part of the biosphere as possible and to create an environment that supports its wider revival and strengthening. The settlement would join, and support, and thus it would also be supported by, the biosphere's welfare. To unite with and to enhance the biosphere means that the place has to work with human responsibility for stewardship, and this will bring us to human spiritual health and evolution. This project will work to vision how that may be realized.

Water

Watersheds are a very appropriate way to define settlement boundaries. The grounds for current settlement boundaries are inscrutable to the biosphere. The area of Parksville does not currently support the hydration of a settlement of its size. Parksville is also increasingly prone to drought, in part because there is substantially less forested area than the area had for millennia, with which the climate was formed . However, there is enough rain annually to support everyone.

Housing

This housing settlement supports people who are low in capital. It has to support home owners with an income below ±CAD50k and people who would otherwise be unhoused. In order to form part of the community, rather than a ghetto of low income people it will be a very high value community and have very high value public space. Rather than a high income enclave with a few means tested units as a sop to the need, this will be a community with a few higher income dwellings for people who like a community and a closer relationship with nature. The high quality of the environment should not allow that the housing become 'overvalued' relative to the local earnings ecosystem. The housing is not appealing as an investment property.

Community

a. Connectivity within and without,

without (default) demand for personal cars and trucks. They are not banned, but the community causes them to be redundant as for regular use. This development is to be conceived foremost as an active community that is equitably and inclusively connected within itself and to the rest of the Parksville area to which it belongs.

b. Responsibility to Indigenous life and values.

We need to create paths to learn a positive way forward beyond current, essentially unmitigated, colonialist results. The approach is to remove barriers that cross the vectors of life according to ways and values prior to European value structures of the past 300 years being imposed across the countryside. The intent is not to re-create a historical model, but to create channels for those values anew. The need is for the original culture to not feel blocked and for people of that culture and values to thrive. Values are missing in our current culture that were present and are present in the traditions and hearts of the local original people, that will allow everyone more health, wealth and wellbeing. The environment must facilitate that, but form for this has to be (re)discovered anew.

I am speaking as a person who was born at Point Grey near UBC in Vancouver, but who is 100% of European descent. My parents arrived only months before I was born. This is my place. My original home. But I also do not belong here, at least not under the terms that cause me to be part of the remorseless crowd benefitting from much destruction and prejudice, which I nominally belong to on the same terms that make me not Indigenous.

c. Unity.

Architecture only exists through our common mind and heart as humanity. I have posted earlier on architecture and how it presences, with its powerful relationship with human consciousness capacity. The number one energy that we have, which is common to all life, is love. It is the reason for these posts and to make settlements better; as love. This is the presencing of architecture and it comes full circle back to our responsibility as stewards of the land, and the interactive responsiveness of our consciousness to the land.

These are topics that prime the need for more housing as architecture. The experiment includes the need to make it accessibly viable, which means buildable and cost-balanced dwellings. The assumption, or rather the faith that I hold, is that this is possible as a cultural setting in a viable relationship to the financial and economic systems we have.

The caveat is that the systems we have are quite obviously failing us now. It can be said that they are doing what they were designed to do in terms of housing, but why else would they exist but to help and serve our needs. Too many people have found ways to extract too much capital from the housing culture, systematically and broadly, and too few are putting capital in, leaving housing culture dysfunctional, broken, and tapped out. This includes the problem of immigration causing rapid increase in demand, since building housing would actually be good business.

It may be hard to see, or perhaps to accept, that the dysfunction that the colonizers, and the powerful inflict is actually the same for the colonizers themselves, they exist under the same regime. Power and wealth allow people to mitigate the dangers and the illnesses that a coercive regime causes, but ultimately the harm is for everyone. It often comes later for the powerful and wealthy, perhaps to their children only, and not to them. Taking without asking, without gratitude and greedily beyond need, is taught to children as harm. It remains harm. Therefore, I cannot take the system as it is as a given. The remainder, i.e. the inequity, the lack of inclusion and the failure of diversity, is too big and we cannot round up to ‘OK’. If it allows too many people to use it in ways that causes pain and loss, undermining the culture, it will be changed.

This project is capacity building. It is conceived to create the social wealth of adequate housing that gives equity, accessibility and inclusion to a culture of housing that is whole and provides a part of the variety needed to fulfill that and to maintain it.

This is a tall order. So we will experiment to see how this can be done.