In honour of the 1900 ‘Exposition Universelle’ in Paris, artists such as Jean-Marc Côté were commissioned to produce a series of pictures predicting what the world might look like in the year 2000. The resulting images, featuring everything from firefighters with bat-wings to domesticated whales being used as transportation, are indicative of two things. One: a rocky relationship with absinthe. Two: a sense of optimism for the future.

The idea of viewing the impending decades with anything less than cynical nihilism is an alien concept to many millennials. Concerns over rising sea levels, nutty presidents and plastic oceans make predictions for the future a bleak exercise. Another worry wrinkling the collective brow of Generation Anxious is that of housing or, to put it another way, ‘oh my God where are we going to put everyone’.

Many are aware of how exceptional the increase in global population in the 20th century was in the context of human existence, but it’s useful to be reminded of just how big a statistical explosion this was, as outlined by Max Roser:

‘… for thousands of years, the population grew only slowly but in recent centuries, it has jumped dramatically. Between 1900 and 2000, the increase in world population was three times greater than during the entire previous history of humanity — an increase from 1.5 to 6.1 billion in just 100 years.’

This radical altering of humankind’s circumstances was not anticipated by Jean-Marc Côté when he was making his optimistic, if slightly insane, predictions for the future and this huge escalation in the number of people inhabiting the planet has naturally led to an increased demand for places to live.

In the case of many cities across the world, this demand has not been sufficiently met. The World Health Organization predicts a global urban population of 6.4 billion by 2050, a worrying statistic given the recent track record of major cities at adequately housing people. CityLab identifies Hong Kong, Sydney, Vancouver, and Melbourne as the worst offenders at failing to provide sufficient affordable housing but my focus will be on the oft cited, and oft lamented, example of London.

It is estimated that London needs around 50,000 new homes every year to meet but despite this, on average since the 1980s, it has built less than 17,000 annually. According to London Councils, the capital requires 809,000 homes by 2021 to meet new housing needs. Rising demand from an increasing population combined with falling household size has led to a massive increase in house prices. As a simple result of supply and demand, this has led a situation where prices are 70% higher than the UK average and 15.7 times the average London income.

The issue of space has been a major cause of this current housing crisis. Certain restrictions specific to London have prevented mass building: the green belt, a ring of countryside around the capital maintained to prevent urban sprawl, has restricted outward expansion. Currently, over a fifth of the land in Greater London is classed as green belt. Equally, protected views, such as that of St. Paul’s Cathedral from Parliament Hill, have meant that areas of London have resisted development.

The scale of this problem has produced a plethora of potential solutions. Much debate has focused on the so-called ‘brownfield’ areas on London, derelict sites that are currently going to waste. The development of these sites would allow for the construction of some housing but not nearly enough to provide for London’s continually increasing population, as outlined by the Museum of London:

‘A 2016 report from housing charity Shelter noted that, to build 50,000 homes using brownfield alone, we would need to build the equivalent of four Olympic Parks a year, on top of what we were already building.’

The answer might very well lie in the efforts of different housing solutions across the globe, as the world’s architects work imaginatively to respond to what is truly an international crisis.

A group in Mexico City, BNKR Arquitectura have, quite literally, inverted the Hong Kong-style response of building upwards. They have floated the idea of an ‘earth-scraper’, a 300-metre subterranean inverted pyramid, essentially an upside-down sky-scraper that goes underground. The proposed architectural marvel would bypass Mexico’s stringent building regulations and the city’s increasing issues with space, whilst preserving the natural area around it. The 65-storey complex would house a museum dedicated to Mexican heritage and 10 floors of affordable housing, with the rest made up of commercial office and retail space, at an estimated cost of $800 million.

If London did decide to follow the traditional root of building up rather than digging down, they might well follow the example of Danish trailblazer Bjarke Ingels. Ingels’s philosophy is a deceptively simple one: to make people happy:

‘What’s really going to make a home a happy place is what a resident does to it and in a way also the freedom a resident has to transform it. What we try to do is deliver an abundance of daylight, generous ceiling spaces, as nice views as possible, and access to big outdoor spaces’

His latest development will be in Vancouver, on what would seem to be unappealing land, right next to the exit ramps of the city’s Granville Bridge. The 151-metre-tall Beach and Howe Tower will be a residential building specifically adapted to a compact urban environment, as detailed by CNBC:

Using cutting edge 3D modelling software, the building’s design has been shaped by a lack of space in the surrounding environment. The tower’s twisting form is due, in part, to architects wanting to ensure that residents’ apartments do not have views of the highway’s traffic

The most viable solution to London’s housing issues might be simpler than inverted pyramids and twisting skyscrapers however. In Japan, a nation whose population is actually decreasing, microhousing has become an established industry. Tiny houses or apartments with often less than 30 metres of floor space, microhouses are mass produced in Japan like cars on an assembly line, offering an alternative to city dwellers restricted by space and cost.

The houses are designed with high ceilings and open-plan floor spaces and are often placed in leftover narrow strips and unused corners of land, meaning that urban expansion would be less of a concern. Although Londoners would have to accept the reduction in living space, microhouses would provide affordable housing for a population that will only increase for the foreseeable future. A feasible solution for a current crisis, microhousing could well be the solution, albeit a temporary one, to one of the most pressing crises of modern times.