Here is an idea to combine two problems affecting cities, disused buildings and waste paper, to help solve the problem of housing shortage, affordable housing and homelessness.

The missing link preventing many unused spaces being easily converted into homes is ‘off-the-shelf’ shower rooms, toilets, kitchens and internal walls that fit through a typical doorway, up a flight of stairs or in a lift, and come with ready to use services integrated, without bespoke building installation. The rest of the home is already available off-the-shelf.

This highly sustainable system, applicable to any vacant building, would utilise recycled waste paper to enable vacant buildings to be adapted and re-used as flexible re-thought homes, quickly, cheaply to aid housing shortages, as well as humanitarian crisis.

MOBILE STATIONS – one for Fuel (kitchen) and one for Sanitation (shower + WC), both made primarily from treated composite cardboard (think Tetra Pak) and existing boat and camper van services technology.

FLEXIBLE DIVISION – A composite cardboard partition wall panel system, in easy to handle and work with interlocking pieces, to create secure, quiet and private dwellings, negating slow / labour intensive single-use timber and plaster stud walls. The top pieces can be easily cut to suit each building’s ceiling height(s).

The wider ambition is to help demonstrate how circular economy principles and adaptive re-use could play a meaningful role in addressing both environmental challenges, growing build costs and insatiable housing pressures.

This project is supported by The Long Table.

One for youth homelessness charity, Centre Point?

Whilst this project addresses underutilised building, another of our projects addresses the underutilised spaces between buildings.