Amenity Commons Network

Violet Whitney
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

Amenities are increasingly important in cold weather cities like Toronto where people rely heavily on the indoors. Current cities function with amenities internally isolated within individual residential developments. Within a city block, various residential buildings from condos, townhomes, coops to multi-family houses, each have enclosed amenities behind their own walls and for their own residents.

The irony of this private amenity system is that while there is a lot of developed space allocated to amenities, occupants only have access to the limited amount of amenities within their own buildings. Meanwhile, most of the amenity infrastructure is redundant. Most condo and multi-family buildings have gyms inside and many have rooftop gardens. So whats stopping two condos next to one another from sharing a gym?

Walkability

One of the first constraints any residential building is dealing with is how far a person is willing to go. While people have different preferences as to what is most important to them, there are common amenities that people prefer to have more regular access to. The proximity needed for a range of amenities should be considered in the distribution of a shared amenity network to allocate resources appropriately.

Amenity Competition

A residential building is also trying to compete with other buildings along the block, so its often not in their best interest to diversity what they are offering, but rather have the best gym. This would change if amenities were more cooperatively shared across buildings.

Gym’s are less risky and costly to build than specialty program like pools, sauna’s or bars. A gym’s shell has hardly any construction requirements. Just placard a room’s walls in mirrors and fill the space with exercise equipment and you’ve got yourself a gym. If the market changes, exercise equipment can be sold, and the space is easily converted into something new. This might be why so many buildings have gyms.

Accountability

There’s no incentive for a residential developer to allow strangers or neighbors next door into a building. Simply put, neighbors next door aren’t paying the rent which covers services, maintenance, wear and tear etc. To further complicate incentives, even if two side-by-side residences wanted to partner up to share amenities, they would need to be able to discourage mis-use of spaces. What’s to keep a neighbor from leaving spaces dirty or advantageously throwing wild parties every weekend. As a building’s residents increase it becomes harder for the building’s management to track whose used what, and for the residents to feel responsible for assets that are shared with so many.

But how do we appropriately allocate resources within a network?

Amenity Commons Network

Lorem ipsum — conclusion about space sharing management management across buildings that allow for a diversified network of unique places and that help develop internal porches.

Violet Whitney

Written by

Spatial tech, design computation, organizational behavior, equity, and gifs. Adjunct Assist Professor @ColumbiaGSAPP. PM, @SidewalkLabs.

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