Towards a solarpunk co-housing future: web3 opportunities

Transcript

[Music] hello everyone I hope you're ready for the next part today uh we have a lot of interesting topics that's loud we have a lot of interesting topics coming up all of them are really grounded instead of being onchain while they have onchain connection so we have a lot about cities about housing and real life use cases and it's a big pleasure to announce the first Speaker of this very interesting series Clarity an architect with a solar Punk Vision who will present how we can enhance co- housing with web

free a lot of applause [Applause] [Music] hello everyone so today I'm going to talk about the current housing challenges that we are facing in grifi areas around the world and how through self organization and web 3 we can move towards having societies that more rigin Sovereign and fair and Advance into this solar Punk Vision my name is CLA I'm an architect I work um creating Co

operatives of social housing and also working in the web3 space in a called dork that we provide web3 development services to many clients um I'll tell you more about later um but let's start with the solar pun Vision I just realized that I don't have like the is somebody like sorry but I just want to start um setting a little bit of the vision of the Sol Punk um in in terms of like applying it to the architecture field and I like to always start with the tradition because this is like knowledge

that has been iterating for years to come up with solutions that are comfortable um are efficient and also are economical using materials that are already in place and I think we should um thank you we should strive to set like this as the base and then you know adapt these principles to our current needs mixed with the current technologies that we have and I'm going to try this okay so these are like examples of traditional architecture that we have back home I'm from Spain and then um as I was saying like using all these knowledge to advance um to having like um sorry B societies and

then I'm going to tell you like some principles to get there using a different scale approach so at the city level we can you know um create a strategies that move the oran environments towards more human Centric and environmentally friendly um homes and one of the first actions is to distribute Services um in various like centers so I'm sort of like decentralizing the you know more like the American city um model and this's like a map from Barcelona where you can see like how neighborhoods are distributed and City centers so you can reach all the things you need in a

walkable distance the second strategy is to push for public transport and then so we are able to you know remove cars and vehicles both Park and movement from spaces to create more spaces that are liveable for humans and then enhance nature and restoration like this project from SE where they remove this highway to create this linear [Applause] Park another example of you know how to approach environmentally friendly um n nature spaces in cities is this project from Singapore where here they designed

the space already taking into account the resilience in climate so for example um when there's like the rainy season you can see like how the park gets floated and in order to uh be able to drain the water easily so it's made on purpose that it gets floated on the neighborhood level we can create neighborhoods that you know generate their own resources in terms of like power um heating Etc they store rain water they create made um places to you know have grow your own food Waste Management public and shared transport as well like this neighborhood that I'm

presenting here in freberg Germany and I'll show you like how it looks like and then when we reach you know like the building scale we need to strive to having buildings that are some sort of like ass self-sufficient as possible so zero or net carbon and then mix it and and also bring you know natural materials cuz like the industry of construction is responsible for the 40% of the CO2 emissions worldwide and I'm going to present some you know let's say let's call it alternative materials hopefully one day they stop being Alternatives but

here you can see a project made with Timber um structures that is called CTL you can build a sky grubber um until you know a certain certain level you can also use a straw like these homes here are made by straw and this is like a really good material because it's highly isolated and then it's one of the most cheapest materials to build with so basically like this is combining a straw with Timber Fame structures another material it's Earth and you can see it here with a school in Bangladesh Anna heringer um Earth construction it's has like thousands thousands of years of history and it's

really cool because um can regulate the Comfort the interial temperature and humidity in in the spaces and also works wonders when we are like working in sismic environments because it vibrates at the same frequency as the earthquakes this is another project made by Earth this is from Louis a back home in the studio where I collaborate and here we are mixing as well like Timber structure with Earth Construction in this case Ram Earth and when we mix these old materials and traditional materials with the current technology we can have 3D printed homes made with

Earth another material that it's considered you know like the um 21st century steel is bamboo and you can see like what we can build with bamboo and the last one is C cardboards and you can see that there's this architect called shikuan that he builds you know whole buildings with carpet but also it's really cool because he can create rapidly like homes for shelter emergency homes with this material and here's a question for the audience from these two pictures which one do you think it's more solar Punk so the one on your left um it's uh

concrete structure that it's basically like a not super sustainable material that had to be oversided because of the weight of the Earth that you need to allocate on the balconies to be able to grow trees apart from that there's no much like P strategies here on your right hand side you have a building in Barcelona that it's made with CT Timber structures that the ones that I show you also the design um follows like passive home principles and also stores rainwater and has their own centralized heating made with um powered with BMS so this is some like my point here so when we are prompting on Mid Journey about

solar Punk realities just to go a little bit over the mile Beyond like The Greenery and the round shapes so this is I try to beefly convey like some of the principles of the solar Punk reies but I want to also some sort of like touch ground and see where we are right now cuz like in many countries around the world we are seeing how rents are getting higher and higher property are ending in hands of great great chers if not like Global investment funds our salaries are extending and add to that gender salary difference and also like

the inflation and then the construction cost that high had Skyrocket in the last four years and if we want to build solar pun realities that comes with an added cost so with families that are getting like more vulnerable and then um you know housing being a fundamental human right um some people can rely like on governments for you know social housing emergency housing like the Netherlands they have like a great 30% stock of social housing but countries like mine we don't even reach like the 2% so when you cannot rely on governments or you

don't fall into the enough vulnerable use cases you don't want to go into the mortgage pathway or maybe like you don't you can go into the mortgage pathway what are our Alternatives so the short answer is self-organization and I'm going to walk you through how is it possible to transition from a market that is speculative towards a market that is owned by Community warrant is fixed prices ensures for long-term stability and also pushes for solar Punk print principles and the first step is to organize ourselves in tenants unions and we've seen like how around the world in

many cities um tenant state union are defending the rights to um against like um tenants um and and then usually like these like these things that we need to defend ourselves because like um there are um sorry I can't find the word but there are lusive practices is perpetrated usually like by corporate landlords so um we've seen as well like here in pra we have an example of like initiative that is working towards like this goal and the second step is to impulse laws that regulate and limit long-term and short-term rents and we've seen

again like the successful use cases around the world have happened because of bottom up initiative and proposal that come come come up to the Parliament and if we raise the bar we can create intentional communities and what's important here or social housing cooperatives and what's important here is to WRA these entities as cooperatives or CLT so the ownership is retained by the legal entity and then members of this entity can have the right to use this place so with these two features we are ensuring the long-term stability and then the fixed prices because members we

are sort of like moving from ownership towards a stewardship and this is a project that we are impulsing back home in a very small village it's 16 units uh of social housing where people are going to have like their own home and they are going to share some of the amenities and Facilities to cut cost and still attain a degree of self-sufficient efficiency in the buildings in this case it's social housing because like the plot is um owned by by the administration and they are losing it for 90 years and then members are going to pay for it with a refundable down payment and then a monthly fee that's still like lower than

the rental um market price and then these also type of communities also add the benefits of having having a community next door and and to me what was what's more important is like housing it's like a community housing is really impactful because it directly triggers like so many verticals like the mobility Food sovereignity Land Management education child Elders scare Etc and the first step would be to leverage all these intentional communities into networks of sovereign um communities like this example in back home again in fund PR which is a network

of Cooperative intentional uh communities that are wrapped into a foundation and this is the legal entity that enables to lock properties outside of the speculative market and make sure that we retain the properties and we um retain like the fixed prices even beyond our lives this foundation in particular is managing land properties knowledge and tools as comment and then if we Center into the community homes um it comes as well with some of some challenges and and most of them are in the phase of like the

incubation of these projects so we have you know ownership governance is limited the access to funding it's all recognized by ethical Banks um coordination and Trust stuff still we are struggling to self organize and you know to to raise this Collective mindset because we're not educated for it and the whole thing makes that this is a super long process and that's why if we want to achieve like let's say a major adoption of this projects we need tools and we need to accelerate it the processes to be able to scale the model and that's why I think we can do that with web three technology so I'm going

to list like some of the you know proposal to overcome these current um struggles that we have current challenges and one is to build customized setups for stealership so we know that if we tokenize a property then you know those who have like more tokens who have buy more tokens have more governance power but we can we have to go beyond that right um we can also tokenize the value added for example like the value added in impulsing this project projects the value added in you know dedicating time for care for elders or children or even time for you know um taking care of the Orchards and stuff like that and we can do that with

tokenization we can also combine permanent and temporary um stewardship and in the future maybe we can you know create Dow federations or even like Sovereign Network protocols I'm going to Pi the example of tdf is traditional Dream Factory a C living organized as a daa in particle um where they follow like the same model on a stealership so they have like a legal entity in this case is an SPV that retains the ownership and then members can buy tokens so one token equals for their right to access the property for one night per year and then they have like some mechanisms that enhance the

governance um through the proof of presence and the proof of sweat proof of presence is like how many nights are you spending there and then they have like a function Decay that sort of like wages down your voting power um based on how long it was that that you were there you were there you you were staying there and then the proof of of sweat is like this way of measuring how much time and effort you are dedicating you're putting in in your your community so then you can also have like more diverse and inclusive um communities where everybody you know um has a representation of

governance when we are trying to solve like how we access to more funds as I was saying like the only way right now in my country is through ethical bank and that's limited funding funds so if we try that communities when they are in the incubation uh phase that they can pull money or stake it in borrow and lenting protocols we can ensure that while we are creating and imposing this project that could last from two to four years we are generating interest also from these tokens listed we can use it as an asset um asset as a collateral and to ask for loans and here is what is important um in these projects we

usually like aim for fixed um interest rates and if I'm not wrong like AA is already like providing for some some of this but we need to you know strive for longer periods of of loans so we can apply for I don't know like 30 years mortgages at a f at a fixed interest in a def5 protocol why not and the also struggle and that could be like an opportunity is you know like a smoother on and on and off ramp because um you know members of Community are non tax people and we are already you know helping people struggling with Google Drive so imagine like you know switching networks metam sending money here and

there we can also like tokenize the property to access to direct um funds and also like use this token again as a collateral to ask for loans in the Defi cofi and refi space this is um this project is not um Collective but still I think it it's relevant is like the first property that was um tokenized here in Europe it was in Paris in 201 um 18 and they created a join stock company to retain again the ownership and then they issued tokens that were like 6.5 um Euros or so and it heads up here like I'm talking about like tokenizing prop properties to get into the

ownership not to you know democratize investing into real Spate so we can have like more speculation even and then when it comes to slow coordination and decision making I think we are going to move you know we see more of these projects moving into hybrid decision- making spaces to accelerate this processes and also use talkin based voting and Anonymous voting because um otherwise um we fall into and we've seen this all Dows how you know um people who retain more tokens in the Dow can influence the results of the others and then we also need to strive for more ux and UI coordination tools and what I

see is like the feature of web 3 being more like web 2 ux UI tools with a blockchain in the back end and the example that I brought that I bring is Boni which is a voting protocol that since 2018 is um is being used by organizations like football club Barcelona or omn cultural which is an entity back home that has 180k members that are voting through a blockchain protocol with a uxx UI that it's web to and in terms of like self-organization and Collective mindset for me is like just get a skin on the game right just get there explore test

work from others and keep improving processes and the use case I want to bring is theor which is like this Collective that I mentioned I'm part of um we are 120 members running our the business as a workers cooperative and what's interesting here is like unlike the traditional cooperatives the access is not guaranteed by an economical fee that represents like the governance and ownership where um instead it's based in meritocracy so that means that for each dollar that you earn contributing at the dowo you earn one token of non transferable like governance power and those members who have been contributing

more to the Dow have more governance power and I think that's super useful and super powerful as well in order to you know get more diverse and diverse organization and also to distribute wealth around the world so we've been around for since 2019 working for more than 100 clients um so far we've generated more than $10 million on chain revenue and all of this has been like boot dropping and with self-organization so to wrap up here imagine like a part of the housing stop would be affordable and R by Community

we would move towards you know having Community benefits that serve for creating new homes we could ensure long-term and affordable model of housing we can push for regenera architecture and restorative ecosystems and we can also Li the impact of housing communities in many other particles uh as I explained to you and these I think it could be possible thanks to web free and technology so if you are working or building any tool any protocol that you think could help housing communities please feel free to reach me out and also if you want to know more about Dior or you need um to accelerate your Rob M

feel free to also reach me out and that's it that's my goal advancing into having more fair Sovereign and riching societies thank you thanks a lot for this presentation we'll be back in a couple of minutes to zoom out from housing to cities and Greenery so we'll see you back in five minutes [Applause] [Music]