What's next?

The foundational group of cities and regions will, with the help of the experts of the DHC thematic groups, deliver three initial seed design types:

1. Affordable housing units (both flats and detached)

2. Schools (standalone and urban)

3. Makerspaces/economic units

All designs of the DHC are open source, freely configurable, freely usable, and fully interoperable with manufacturing and BIM standards, as well as urban digital twin data models and open application programming interfaces.

Following the seed design stage, the building typology will be gradually expanded to eventually include any built object in an urban environment, and the digital repository of design instances for each building type will grow based on both the work in the thematic groups and outside-in contributions from the broader creative value chain.

Flanking the design, elicitation, and standardisation activities will be a series of so-called 'yellow papers' produced by the experts of the thematic groups to support the transformation process of regions, cities, and communities worldwide. Eventually, this work will be turned into a freely accessible academy that helps policy makers make the right choices in what, how, why, when, and where to build. The first yellow paper - introducing the initiative - can be found here.

Why is this initiative important?

The Digital Housing Commons is an initiative of the FutureCraft Foundation. FutureCraft is a purpose-built entity created to solve three intertwined, wicked societal problems – climate change, affordable housing, and ethics-by-design – with an exceptionally scalable third-party-payer model that is unique in the market and is poised to disrupt the global construction industry.

We open-source the entire segment of the construction process leading up to the production-ready, machine-readable files for the factory, making it completely free to use, for everyone, everywhere, forever. This alone significantly drives down the cost of construction (e.g. in our parts of the world, for a single-family home, that part of the process will typically cost EUR 60-80k today, and this becomes zero tomorrow) with the specific aim of making nature-based, climate-positive construction the norm in all parts of the world, and accessible to any construction stakeholder.

The platform features a configurator to support design and adaptation based on local conditions, and over time we will integrate satellite-based, data-driven, AI-supported design capabilities that have already been validated in pilots over the past 18 months.

Ultimately, we will create the largest collection of open-source, nature-based, architecturally certified building and neighbourhood designs in the world: The Digital Housing Commons.

Free to use, by anyone, anywhere, forever.

The Digital Housing Commons is structured under a not-for-profit foundation, the FutureCraft Foundation vzw, that is being organised to encompass all aspects related to the commons and open source intangible assets and place those under the auspices of public mandate holders, and that can respond to demand and changes in demand - by being demand. Indeed, cities and regions worldwide will be invited to take part in and ownership of the FutureCraft Foundation and assume fiduciary obligations over the Digital Housing Commons flagship initiative, with the support of the expert partners.

The Foundation has already been incorporated in light of addressing initial organisational needs. We intend to cooperatively shape the bylaws, and in due course the statutes, with the membership of the organisation. All open source designs - in short, the commons - will be governed by the Foundation, and the ownership will follow the same lines - yet in many cases IP will be jointly owned with creators worldwide - in short, the creative industry.

It is crucial to have the demand side of the market on board as it is procurement that will unlock the pivot towards a nature-based construction sector. Demand drives change. Change requires capital. Capital builds solutions. And solutions satisfy demand. But a solution without demand perishes. Demand without a solution lives on, and the value of solving grows. That is why we focus on wicked problems, and in a very specific way.

How is everything funded?

By the good we do. Because we only deliver climate-positive, SDG-driven designs (we only guarantee architectural soundness for those materials) we deliver measurable impact that allows us to fund the entire programme by transacting the sequestered carbon in the constructive wood.

Because there is quite some time between design and construction, we have private capital on board to help bridge that gap and make the change happen.

Nobody needs to pay us anything to get everything they need to build a sustainable, healthy, and smart house, building, or neighbourhood. We are free for everyone, everywhere, forever.

We are paid purely based on the impact we generate, by entities that need to offset their excess carbon in the market. Neat, isn't it?

Who are the partners of the initiative?

Over the course of less than three years, groups of small teams have been working on several strategic lines simultaneously with the objective of developing cooperative capacity for systemic change based on creating the precise conditions for the complete transformation of the global construction sector. This included exploratory cross-domain research, a pilot project where the house ended up being designed by AI, extensive engagements with global ecosystems and policy stakeholders, key partnership developments, forward-looking financing pathway development with private and institutional investors, co-design and requirements elicitation with future customers, consortium building, legislative scoping, technical roadmap development, and the list goes on. We were able to execute this enormous amount of work with these small teams largely because the costs hitherto have been founder-funded, and because we were fortunate to have access to a trusted network of world-leading experts and collaborators.

As the results started to take shape, the teams were increasingly invited into world-class ecosystems of innovators and engaged with the best and brighest in their field, many of whom are partners of the initiative today, e.g. 10x100 (European Forum Alpbach), MTF Labs (New European Bauhaus), KPMG Global, Global Innovation Gathering, Industry Commons Foundation, Roof over Our Heads, Creatomus, VITO, FIWARE Foundation, Hestia.ai, CERN Ideasquare, QuT Design Lab, TU Delft, Innovawood, 2050Materials, Latitudo40, European Space Cooperative, ISSIP, Dark Matter Labs, GATE Institute, Narnix, Mumbai Mission, Makindye Ssabagabo, SmartCT, and many others.

The expert partnerships will be further formalised over the course of the next months and announced jointly with the signatories of the 'Declaration to #EndTheStoneAge' in December.

How do I get my city involved?

All cities are invited to sign the Declaration to #EndTheStoneAge. City stakeholders can also:

• Contribute to and propose new seed designs of the Digital Housing Commons

• Participate in the Governing Bodies and Thematic Groups of the Digital Housing Commons

• Pioneer city-governed, open-source, climate-positive buildings and share best practices on the DHC platform and as part of an upcoming international news article series.

• Provide infrastructure and programme support to local stakeholders to accelerate maker-made, open-source, and nature-based solutions and value models to support social cohesion and spur pivotal business models that aid policy makers in addressing societal challenges.