Release Vancouver Design Nerds Present CUBE LIVING: A New Way of Thinking About Space

By The Vancouver Design Nerds

Cube is an exciting new product that brings locative social web technologies into the world of real estate development.

The phenomenon of Vancouver real-estate has long been a topic of local obsession. Some of the earliest maps of the lower mainland were created to facilitate the territorialization and appropriation of the lower mainland and to sell Vancouver, not as a place, but as an idea to European settlers.

With the rise of the podium-tower, the one-bedroom condo has become the base unit of real estate equity; with it, a genre of marketing has emerged who’s primary function is not to promote condos but the creation and refinement of the idea of Vancouver. Dissociated from the ground and the tangible value associated with land, the condo is allied to, and has become synonymous with, this idea; a collage of lifestyle, consumer services, and two-dimensional impressions of a landscape.

Vancouver real estate is, and has always been, a speculator’s marketplace. Ownership, in the minutest fraction, has become the badge of membership in an increasingly exclusive club. But opportunities for first-time buyers to access that marketplace are becoming increasingly scarce. The City of Vancouver’s recently approved “Eco-density” initiative attempts to address a perceived housing shortage by subdividing and concentrating real-estate into smaller increments. The commercial development sector continues to offer smaller units to the marketplace ostensibly to address affordable access to real-estate.

Both the City’s zoning changes and the development sector’s ‘down-size’ strategy abet the speculation process. Most of Vancouver’s real estate development follows a capital-intensive industrial model where housing is created via massive serial production of similar pre-packaged commodity units. The uniformity of the commodity protects investment and increases liquidity (ease and speed of turnover) but virtually eliminates people’s productive engagement with, and individual control of, the space they inhabit. This results in the primacy of investment in space as a commodity at the expense of inhabitation.

Cube expands the speculative real-estate model to its logical conclusion, unleashing the potential of space as a fully tradeable commodity.

Join Alex Grunenfelder and Mark Ashby on Wednesday, July 2 at 7:00pm for the introduction of ‘Cube: A New Way of Thinking About Space’ at Centre-A Gallery (2 West Hastings St, Vancouver).

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