On a Thursday evening in late June, a single modular house was craned into Bromley Council Civic Centre car park.
It took five minutes to drop ZedPods’ ground-floor kitchen diner into place and a further 15 minutes to plug in the first floor comprising the bedroom and bathroom. The full assembly took just an hour. The following morning council employees parked up next to the home and the council began inviting residents to try out the new accommodation.
Bromley Council is exploring a £3.8m investment to erect 25 of these units at the council-owned car park on Burnt Ash Lane, providing low-carbon, sustainable homes, while also retaining the revenue stream, with a potential to expand this to a number of sites.
“The home is there to show what real construction can do. It doesn’t need to be a small, unexciting, uninspired home. It can be one of the highest-quality homes with the best performance achievable,” says Rehan Khodabuccus, operations director at ZedPods.
“The best way to do this is to build it off-site at a factory, under high control specification. It is quick to erect, with the minimum time on the site.”
ZedPods’ modular homes were designed by RIBA award-winning architect Sir Bill Dunster in 2016. “Most urban centres are constrained. But there are large expanses of tarmac that just have cars in them. Why not build the houses people need, sustainably, in city centres where they need to be,” says Khodabuccus.
The home does feel slightly out of place outside Bromley Civic Centre, but behind the triple-glazing, with the blinds down you wouldn’t know there are 691 parking spaces just outside the front door.
Bromley Council has more car parks than any other London borough – numbering 45 – offering the potential to grow this significantly. This means the council can provide a fast housing solution for people in temporary accommodation, or those who have been moved out of the borough, at a cost to the local authority.
“Rather than having costs go out, they can have income coming in and go back to being asset owners at the same time,” says Khodabuccus.
Of course, the location brings up some particular challenges. In a post-Grenfell world, the first question is always about fire safety.
“Because you are building over a car park with the risk of fire underneath, you need adequate means of escape and, if there were a fire in one building, you would have at least 60 minutes [before it took hold] in the next.”
The homes are designed to cut out noise and fumes, and emerging models offer electric charging points, helping local authorities to future-proof car parks and deliver improved environmental benefits.
Car park development is the ‘low-hanging fruit’, but a car-free future could deliver far more land and greater value
– Nick Whitten | research director | JLL
In UK cities, some 10,500 car parks could provide the space for up to 400,000 homes, according to research from JLL. Half of these come from local authority-owned car parks.
But there is still a long way to go. ZedPods currently has 88 units in planning and a goal to turn out around 250 a year. The construction company has agreements with a number of local authorities, and hopes to expand through different public sector groups, such as the NHS, as well as moving into higher-density schemes and working with private sector landowners.
“We can build anything over traditional hardstanding,” says Khodabuccus. In car parks, the sky is the limit, as others across the globe are beginning to discover.
Accelerating development
As Copenhagen extends the boundaries of the city into a new area called Orestad, cars are not only useful for residents – at one iconic scheme they make up the bulk of the design.
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels’ Mountain Dwellings is two-thirds parking to one-third living, with 80 apartments with roof gardens on top of 480 parking spaces which connect to the street via a staircase on the mountainside.
“Instead of traditional stacked apartments, the development has terraced houses, which would be unfinanceable on its own, but the parking pays for it,” says Ingels.
“One of the challenges of residential development is on the margins, especially if it is mid-market or affordable. You don’t have a lot of resources, so if you combine it with other things, those other programmes can also contribute to the environment.”
Others worldwide have proposed different versions of this, but most ideas have yet to make it off the drawing board, at least to any scale.
US architectural firm KTGY has designed a concept to turn old multistorey structures into apartments by dropping shipping container homes into the structures.
Meanwhile, in Bordeaux, Vinci and ADIM have developed 19 homes on top of a multistorey car park at the Euratlantique development. The car park is sandwiched between the lightweight residential development and ground-floor retail, ensuring activity at the business hub at different times of the day.
A car-free future
“There are two ways to develop residential property on a car park. You can build above a car park, use the airspace and maintain the parking spaces, or flatten the car park and reuse the land to build wholly new developments,” says JLL research director Nick Whitten.
Examples of the latter are becoming increasingly common as car usage shrinks in urban areas.
In Bournemouth, Morgan Sindall has a £500m joint venture with the local authority to transform 17 car parks into housing and student accommodation, while also retaining some of the public car parks.
Whitten says car park development is “low-hanging fruit”, but a car-free future could deliver a far more land and greater value. He estimates that in London alone some 2.7m privately-owned cars occupy some 7,800 acres at any one moment. That is the equivalent of 23 Hyde Parks or 6.5 Olympic Parks, taking up 2% of total land.
“Car parks are going to become surplus to requirement and they will become good development sites, as they are reasonably sized pieces of land. But there is also a lot of other land that could become available for re-use. You might see whole roads given over to other uses.”
He says this space could be employed for “better economic, social or environmental use”. This includes cycle lanes, linear parks, street furniture, improved air quality, but also housing and house extensions replacing redundant garages and driveways.
It may seem a Utopian future, but across Europe a number of city centres are becoming car-free. This year Oslo will officially become car-free and Madrid will follow next year with urban planners banning cars from 500 acres of the city. Most Dutch city centres are car-free and, in Utrecht, an old 11-lane motorway was recently demolished, allowing the return of the city moat.
For the likes of ZedPods, a car-free future wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. “That would only help, because it will free up more parking spaces,” says Khodabuccus.
But it’s not something they anticipate any time soon and ZedPods is taking advantage of its unique position in the UK.
“I think it will be a long time before we start seeing car parks disappear, which strengthens our solution because we are offering ways of improving that parking facility while also providing housing.”
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