Hillside Housing for Health

Hillside Housing for Health (revision of older material)

By John Taylor; 2006 August

Most new houses built in North America are low-density, high profit "McMansions," built in areas exclusively dedicated to the automobile. Streets are consciously designed to discourage all uses other than driving a private automobile. This policy was long justified by traffic engineers for reasons of safety, but as Jane Jacobs proves, this flies against all the evidence. Worse, by discouraging active lifestyles statistical studies have found that these suburban jungles rob from their inmates at least two years of their expected lifespan. With no reason to walk anywhere, chronic illnesses such as cancer and heart disease are now endemic in areas both rich and poor.

Contrastingly, older streets are broad and tree-lined. Many boulevards, though old fashioned, have become beloved landmarks crowded with pedestrians pursuing a variety of street activities; artists and bosquers ply their trade on the broad sidewalks, children playing boisterous games, bicycle riders and in-line skaters plying their side lanes and boardwalks. These places are, against all expectations, safer and healthier than sprawl, be it urban or suburban. Even crime rates are lower, since the crowded street scene is under close supervision from permanent, concerned residents around the clock. In Italy, whose cities were designed centuries ago, heart disease is half that of the United States, land of super-sized portions, of driving everywhere and entire sub-divisions without sidewalks.

It has been discovered that even small design changes within buildings encourage active choices. One experiment placed elevators into the background and made the door to stairwells more prominent, leading to an attractive well lit space stairway decorated with plants and artwork. These stairs not been used at all, but with these small alterations they soon became crowded. Unnumbered urban planning studies have proven that the inhabitants of older neighborhoods offering a mix of shops and businesses within easy walking distance are 35 percent less likely to become obese.

The neighborhoods in North America with the highest land values invariably have varied and often intense land use. Many used to be considered slums and were slated for demolition before they were gentrified. And for good reason, they are the most interesting as well as the healthiest places to live. Nor are "extreme" landscaping arrangements necessarily less salutary. It is known that in mountain villages, where everything is built along a steep slope, obesity is all but unknown among lifelong dwellers. Yet in every construction project the first thing they do is level the whole area. This removes the character from an area and makes a traveler feel that no matter where he may roam, every place looks like every other.

Hillside housing is designed from the ground up to promote diversity and local character, as well as the health of its inhabitants. Its mound form has inset dwellings built in long rows running east to west. The north side is devoted to human habitations and the south side, facing the sun, to agriculture, greenhouses, solar panels and parks.

Architect Moshe Safdie changed how I imagine the look of the shady face of these proposed hillside developments. The north side of this row housing I had thought of as ordinary apartments above with street level shops, factories and places of business below. Safdie promotes variety, builds cities on hilly land, and his most famous work, Habitat, persuaded me that a jagged facade would be the way to optimize the view for hillside apartments on the north side.

Safdie's Habitat '67 in Montreal, was, according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a "bold experiment in prefabricated housing ... comprising three clusters of individual apartment units arranged like irregularly stacked blocks along a zigzagged framework." In his book, "The City after the Automobile," he describes how as a young architect he spent many late nights connecting and disconnecting Lego blocks, modeling experimentally how Habitat could provide maximal, equal exposure for each apartment to sun, sky and that spectacular view of the ships plying Montreal's port facility. His final product, the blocky outer super-structure of Habitat made of concrete, looks strange from the outside but those fortunate people living inside it say that from their viewpoint, looking out from their windows and balconies, Habitat approaches the ideal.

I know by personal experience that living in a home with a commanding view of the immediate neighborhood can be a surprisingly effective way to keep depression at bay, bring variety into daily life and increase one's concern about neighbors and neighborhood events. A Habitat-like facade for a mound development would allow equal access to the panorama outdoors for both rich and poor, for temporary and permanent residents alike.

In his later years, as fractal mathematics and chaos theory became the rage, Moshe Safdie latched onto fractals as an explanation of why the final arrangement of his Habitat housing complex looked like as it did. Fractals map the endless, beginingless, puffy, undulating edges of clouds, explain how they can shift and swallow one another. A Habitat apartment complex, Safdie thought, looks as fluid as a fractal and similarly retains its shape whether seen from close up or afar, the same as clouds, galaxies and sandy shorelines.

A hillside development would resemble a fractal even more than Habitat, since it would be literally fluid and dynamic. As with Habitat, dwelling units would be set into permanent niches, plant-lined balconies running up the north side. But, characteristically, these dwelling units would shift from place to place. Modular apartment units of standard size would be transported by rails running inside the building that would connect to trains running underneath the development. A given dwelling unit might move overnight to any location elsewhere in the neighborhood or indeed anywhere in the world.

By and large the ground is not flat, its run up and down hills, and where there are no hills there already, artificial ones are piled up in the early stages of construction by bulldozers. Interspersed are tall lookouts that also function as farmers' silos, heat towers and the bases of wind turbines. Some of the towers have climbing surfaces and slides and waterslides running down their outside face. The street corners between neighborhood blocks are often domed over and devoted to farmer's markets, kiosks and a variety of other uses. Some corner intersections are open to the elements.

Another way hillside housing might promote health is in its "service house" design. These semi-communal housing projects in Scandinavia already include many services only available to a wealthy elite elsewhere. This housing style has been described as,

"a group of independent self-sufficient homes, like any contemporary residential development, but resident families in the neighborhood have access to communal facilities and recreational areas. The community building has a common dining room for all residents and a day care center for children, in addition to other common rooms." (Schoenauer, 460)

Since the mobile living units would contain only a bathroom, bedroom and working space, common rooms in the area would be needed to supplement this limited personal living space. While the hillside housing container would have outside it a small balcony and other personal space, and while a person so inclined could have meals sent in and eat alone, this would be discouraged. Studies have found that people involved in a church or other organization live longer and have fewer mortal health conditions. The hillside community would be designed around the basic need that every healthy, well rounded, sane individual has for a varied, warm social atmosphere. Should one individual not happen to fit into a particular neighborhood social milieu, they would be moved around until a mix congenial to their personality is discovered.

Among the greatest standing threats to human health is vermin, especially rats, which have been estimated to eat or spoil between a quarter to one third of our food supply. Rats spread disease and snack on electrical insulation, thus causing a large percentage of fires, both industrial and domestic. It is recognized that if we could only eliminate waste it would actually be quite easy to eliminate rats. Hillside housing is designed to reduce waste and reduce access to it by disposing of it as quickly as possible.

Thus, hillside meals would be prepared in large, communal but professionally designed kitchens using locally grown produce. Meals are delivered directly by encapsulated pneumatic tubes to the common dining rooms throughout the neighborhood. Uneaten food would immediately be sent back by the same tubes to specially designed composting bins. Garbage would never be allowed to sit and wait for pickup by noisy garbage trucks. Sitting garbage offers tempting meals for rats. Since rats thrive on sewage as well as garbage, toilets using "black box" technology would compost waste on-site, then their soil enhancing product would be sped by pneumatic tube to local gardens, again offering as little access as possible to vermin. Hillside developments, being off the grid, would make use of solar and wind charged batteries -- also delivered by capsulated pneumatic tubes -- in order to reduce the need for power lines and the electrical insulation that rats enjoy eating so much.

As mentioned, the great distinguishing feature of hillside housing is modularity, the ability to move any dwelling, be it a home or a place of business, from any point to any other location overnight. In these neighborhoods houses, shops and places of business would be moved around to maximize the many factors that contribute to a healthy lifestyle, including the amount of exercise required to perform everyday tasks. It is reasonable to assume that with monitored experimentation some mixes and patterns will prove themselves more effective than others. The more attractive shifts and combinations might succeed in doing what is very rare in a static neighborhood; that is, without any particular effort of will, to prompt sedentary citizens to make big lifestyle changes, to become pedestrians, to climb stairs more often and generally move their own bodies from place to place as a matter of course.

I anticipate that even temporary moves that are later reversed could have hidden, unforeseen benefits. For example, moving a barbershop from a ground level stall to a rooftop location for a few months and then back down to the street again might jog the habits of its clientele for the better. Even after they no longer are forced to climb the stairs to the top of the building to have their hair cut, the new habit would be established. They might then be prone to climb the stairs and partake of the upper lookouts from time to time for other reasons, or just to enjoy the view.

What is more, a flexible, shifting arrangement of a hillside neighborhoods would allow for specialization. Neighborhoods surrounding a hospital might find it advantageous to make everything easily accessible and maintain a quiet, low stimulus atmosphere in order to promote healing among the sick, weak and elderly. Another neighborhood might enhance its appeal to the younger crowd by encouraging a more high-stimulus lifestyle; they might sponsor street dances, music festivals and sports events. Another hillside block might work on educational services, another on artistic endeavors, anything under the sun that people value. Real gains would be monitored, assessed, and automatically publicized on the Internet. Permanently raised land values and shared, cooperative ownership would make it in the interest of every resident to support these initiatives. The system would be designed to give sway to industrious families and groups who prove themselves energetic, constructive and unified enough to contribute to such specialization in their neighborhood.

Since we are discussing health, let us imagine that one hillside block built on a hill decides to work on its existing advantages for encouraging an unusually strenuous lifestyle. It would soon gain a reputation for accomplishing weight loss among other residents in the region. The ability to take off fat unconsciously, without conscious effort, is extremely valuable. Right now people in need of weight loss flock to extremely expensive "fat farms," which, like dieting, does not work for long because our daily environment is built to encourage obesity rather than eliminate it.

An obese person living in a hillside designed city need not even be aware of the structural changes that are bringing about his or her loss of weight. They need only stipulate weight loss as a goal at one point in their lives, and sooner or later their apartment would locate itself in a "fat farm" oriented neighborhood. This automatic nature of the process would reduce the present stigma of being singled out for special treatment.

Others, the frail, weak and elderly, for whom too much strenuous daily effort is genuinely dangerous, would find themselves shifting into the differently designed locales built around hospitals. By catering to specialized needs a responsive neighborhood could earn its own increases in real estate values, as well as cashing in on savings from reduced health care costs.