Real Estates: life without debt

摘要

The question of housing affordability is at the forefront of most people's minds. Most of what I read in the media frames this issue as a crisis: our government speaks of it in the same terms as a natural disaster, something that has happened to us rather than something we have created. It is therefore a shot in the arm to read Real Estates: Life Without Debt, edited by Fulcrum (Jack Self and Shumi Bose). The book is a carefully curated collection of essays that explore the moral, political and economic ramifications of property and ownership. It asks what role the architect might play in addressing widening social and spatial inequality in the built environment. The introduction by Jack Self, immediately acknowledges that architects cannot 'solve' this problem so there is a touch of irony in the fact that a majority of the 15 contributors are architects.