reprinted from a feature article written by Sarah Wilcox for Chapel Street Precinct

Urban sprawl is so five minutes ago. The Australian dream of a house on a quarter acre block is dead. Skyscrapers are moving to the suburbs. This progress is a double-edged sword that leaves us wondering: how might our future selves live?

Back to the Future

To figure out where Melburnians might be headed, it helps to look at from where we have come. It’s the job of futurist Morris Miselowski to predict (with research and evidence rather than some kind of psychic vision) social and business trends.

He’s tickled by the idea that we have come full-circle with our desires since our parents’ generations, “when my parents came as ethnics in the 40s we lived on top of the shop and that was a bad thing to do. The first thing you did to prove yourself was to get out of there. Now it’s the exact opposite. To live in a trendy shopping centre is actually seen as a sign of prosperity, people aspire to it.”
He explains that prior to the 60’s, homes were traditionally the female bastion. Men came and went using the home as a transport hub. Strip shopping centres were built to accommodate women walking to them.

In the 70s women began to work out of the home more, it became more ordinary for people to share chores. People began to be at home for longer periods of time, “we stopped covering up the couch in plastic and having beautiful pristine rooms that only the priest was invited to once a year and everybody else whispered in.”

In the 80s and 90s that we were still working nine to five, shopping nine to five and we owned two cars.

Society still required us to have that house and backyard to prove that we’d made it. Says Morris, “I have the mortgage, it’s choking me, but I have the mortgage! Part of my retirement is that home and if you really wanted to show off you’d have a two storey home on the quarter acre block.” This era, of a mere decade ago, is almost forgotten.
Morris says the last ten years have made Melburnians “less comfortable, we’ve seen lots of issues around employment, money, bank rates, and the pragmatist in us has come out…we have to give up on that dream if we want quality of life”. We now work when and where it’s appropriate, shop when we wish, “and we want to be close to entertainment, close to family or just close to something that bring us comfort and joy”.
The trophy home is no longer important. Sharing things rather than possessing things has lost its stigma. We now share cars, dwellings, leisure spaces, amenities and holiday homes happily…even pets!
So how are these social pressures going to sculpt where we live? Morris envisions a trend for four to six storey apartment blocks inspired by the Asian style of living. While it seems we’ll work from home more often, we’ll actually live many of our waking hours out on the street.
“We will have self-driving cars in the next 10 years.”

Moving with the Times

Globally, inventors are seriously toying with the idea of Futurama-style transportation tubes. Until then, transport – and parking – is a major cause of objection to dense residential plans. Morris believes we will have self-driving cars in the next 10 years, “one in four cars sold in 2020 will be capable.
Volvo, VW, Merc and a few others already have apps that will theoretically allow the car to park itself, the technology exists, laws just need to catch up”. The car could park itself kilometres away, saving time and valuable space within the building.
“The car will know you want it because you’ve started moving out of the house so it will call itself up and be ready for you,” he says. Expect to be riding around in vehicles akin to KITT from Knight Rider sometime soon.

On the Inside

Morris looks to Japan, “they have apartments that are basically a square box. In the middle it has another large-ish box and that box rotates with four sides. Every side is different; one side is a kitchen, one side’s a bedroom, one’s an office, one is a loungeroom. Sounds kitschy but it actually works beautifully!”
Morris says we will demand more from internal architecture. No more pushing buttons on the lift. The elevator will recognise you personally and take you home.

Your apartment will let you in, dim the lights when you lie down, play the song you were vibing to on the train home.

Walls may move or disappear. Furniture, the room and even the mood of the space will reconfigure themselves depending on what you’ve got planned on your digital calendar.

Sound like sci-fi? Welcome to the “Internet of Things”.

Morris says the real beginning of this trend is only five to ten years away.