Rethinking Urban Living:
In Conversation with Alexis Kalagas
06.03.25

Alexis Kalagas works across urban strategy, research, design, and development, with a focus on housing, neighbourhoods, and urban futures. A former foreign policy advisor with the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, he has contributed to social design projects worldwide with the Zürich-based Urban-Think Tank and, more recently, in Australia as head of public programs at Molonglo. His work has been exhibited at the Seoul Biennale and Oslo Architecture Triennale, and his writing includes Reactivate Athens: 101 Ideas (2017).

Here, Hayley Tillett, Writer & Producer at NHO, sat down with Alexis to discuss his latest research examining the rise of solo living in Australia and his vision for a new generation of cooperative housing.

Portrait courtesy of Willem-Dirk du Toit.

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HT: Welcome, Alexis. Thanks for joining us. Can you tell us about your journey into urban strategy and research?

AK: It’s probably a little unorthodox! I’ve always been fascinated by cities, but that interest didn’t immediately dovetail with my professional life. A key moment was being involved in something called the Broadmoor Project during an exchange semester in Boston. It was an initiative that matched teams of graduate students in design, public policy, business, law, and public health with a real-world client in New Orleans. The aim was to support long-term neighbourhood recovery after the devastation of Hurricane Katrina.

It was a really instructive experience in understanding how, at its core, urban strategy is multi-layered, collaborative, and transdisciplinary. It’s never just spatial. Our client actually went on to become the first ever female mayor of New Orleans. I was studying in Geneva at the time, after a stint as a foreign policy advisor in Canberra, and working with NGOs involved in armed conflict resolution. Not too long after I moved to Zürich and joined an interdisciplinary design practice called Urban-Think Tank. That pivot really set me on my way.

HT: As Australia sees a significant rise in lone-person households, what challenges do traditional housing models present for this growing demographic, and how can we rethink design and development to better serve solo residents?

AK: The simple answer is there’s no one-size-fits-all approach. One in four households now are single-occupant and it’s the fastest-growing household type. To put it in context, within the next decade lone-person households will outnumber nuclear families. Some people are living alone by circumstance, others by choice. It’s a pretty broad category that encompasses everyone from a young professional enjoying their first rush of independence in an apartment in Collingwood to a divorced empty nester in a four-bedroom house in the suburbs.

It’s important to remember though that Australian cities were developed with nuclear families as the dominant social paradigm. 70 percent of dwellings in Melbourne have three or more bedrooms. There’s a push underway in certain areas to address this gap through new development. But the answer in the last 30 years or so has been to flood urban housing markets with a fairly generic solution: the one-bedroom apartment. During the apartment boom, one-beds were very much an investor-focused product. They were located in the lowest-value parts of a project, the people who bought them didn’t live in them, and they still have the highest rental turnover. For renters they’re also expensive. So you have a choice between a high price for autonomy, or sharing a dwelling designed for the intimacy of a familial relationship.

I’m most interested in how the housing market can adjust and innovate in the face of demographic change. In the past, architects and developers responded creatively to societal shifts that produced new forms of urban living. Think, for example, of interwar ‘bachelor flats’ for the influx of single working men, which replaced converted terraces and boarding houses. Or the drive-up villa units that began to proliferate around the same time divorce laws were liberalised in the mid-1970s. Lone person households today have so many unmet needs – social isolation, the ‘single tax’, the inability to age in community. The current system isn’t responding to the diversity and specificity of how we actually live.

HT: Can you share any standout examples, locally or globally, where these challenges have been successfully addressed?

AK: My research is very much a work-in-progress. It’s hard to discuss a topic like this in Melbourne though without referencing the Cairo Flats. Today, the focus tends to be on the compact apartment footprints. But Best Overend, who was both the architect and instigator, was heavily influenced by ‘existenzminimum’ ideas circulating in Europe during his time in London in the 1930s. Yes, private living space was reduced, but that was balanced by access to communal spaces and services. A dining room, laundry facilities, a huge shared rooftop, a generous central garden. The scale is also conducive to building community. There’s a reason it’s still so popular.

Internationally, Zürich is definitely a touchstone for me. Forty-five percent of households there are single-occupant. I became really fascinated by the experiments in collective living in cooperative housing projects, often led by people who had formative experiences in the 1980s squatting scene. Cultural norms are obviously important. You could see though how cooperatives were grappling with universal questions of privacy, autonomy, and belonging, and how our preferences might change and evolve.

One innovation that emerged is the cluster apartment. Each apartment-like unit is effectively a cell within an extended resident community. You can live autonomously, but cross the threshold of your private living space and you’re part of an 8-12 person cluster organised around connected kitchen, dining, and living areas. Spaces to come together and socialise. As a typology it’s gone mainstream. It’s being replicated by for-profit developers.

HT: Are there any other international projects that have piqued your interest?

AK: I’m keen to visit a number of projects in Japan. One is Apartment House in Tokyo by Takahashi Ippei. It’s not really a house or an apartment complex. It’s a building designed for eight individuals to live independently, but each unit has one defining element: a spacious bath, double-height windows that catch the morning sun, an elaborate kitchen. If you rarely feel like cooking at home, the lack of a kitchen might not bother you, but an evening bath is a quiet luxury. The idea is that the building is only truly experienced as the sum of its parts, and that requires a necessary kind of neighbourliness to emerge. It’s obviously not a mass market model. But it asks some really interesting questions about how we coexist in cities that are becoming more atomised.

HT: On the subject of housing innovation, your work on cooperative housing offers a scalable ‘middle ground’ for Australians locked out of traditional homeownership. Do some of the solutions for solo living overlap or inform your vision for cooperative housing?

AK: Absolutely. The space for experimentation in Australia is constrained by perceptions of market risk. It’s why the growth of the build-to-rent sector promised so much. The investment timelines are different, projects have a single owner, there is potential for movement within a building, and the key metric is occupancy rather than resale value. We haven’t really seen much of an attempt by build-to-rent operators here to explore new typologies though – there’s been a convergence at the upper end of the market around delivering fairly conventional hotel-style amenity.

HT: What project benchmarks have inspired your approach?

AK: I already mentioned cooperative housing in Zürich in the context of cluster apartments. In a sense, the Zürich cooperative model is a form of non-profit build-to-rent that’s focused on generating long-term public value. The model creates space for design innovation because it’s not speculative. It doesn’t need to produce an investment return. Below-market rents tied to the cost of development minimise the risk of vacancy. And cooperative members are involved in shaping design briefs, especially through competitions.

A few projects have become relatively well-known in Australia, at least among architects. Kalkbreite and Mehr als Wohnen, for example. There are some earlier adaptive reuse projects though that demonstrate the flexibility of the underlying financial model. One, which I used to live around the corner from, is called Dreieck. Back in the 1970s, the City of Zürich acquired 13 buildings that hadn’t been maintained well and were in poor condition – a full urban block. The city expected they would be demolished for a transport project. But the project was rejected in a referendum, and the residents and local community campaigned to halt the demolition. They eventually founded the Dreieck cooperative and negotiated a 60-year lease from the city.

Since the late 1990s, the cooperative has refurbished and renovated all but two of the original buildings, which were 100-years-old and structurally unsound. In their place they added two contemporary infill buildings, which sensitively fill the gaps in the block and complement the existing fabric while introducing ground-floor space for values-aligned businesses. It’s just a beautiful, modest piece of city that opens itself to the neighbourhood and demonstrates the benefits of long-term local investment, stewardship, and care. The rents are also really cheap. Almost half what I was paying in the private rental market.

HT: What are the key principles behind your proposed limited-equity model, and how has the pilot project progressed so far? Can you share any insights into the challenges and opportunities you’ve encountered?

AK: We’ve spent a lot of time working through the complexities of how you translate the Zürich model, with its 100-year history and enabling policy environment, to an Australian context. There’s a clear need though. The median deposit for a first-home buyer in Melbourne has increased by 82 percent in the last five years. Average help from the ‘bank of mum and dad’ is $73,000, but most people don’t expect any support at all. And meanwhile, rents have gone up by more than 50 percent in the last ten years. Almost half of rentals are unaffordable to a typical household, and the average length of a tenancy is less than two years.

We believe our Middle Ground model is one answer to address the large pool of middle-income households that earn too much to be eligible for social and affordable housing, but are struggling with rising rents and insecurity in the rental market. At its core is the concept of ‘cost rent’, which means that what you pay to live in a project is tied to repaying the cost of the development and its ongoing maintenance over a long period. It shields residents from market forces. Residents buy into the cooperative through a refundable ‘deposit’. You can stay for as long as you want. Rent is capped, so the built-in annual increase is less than half the comparable increase in Melbourne over the last decade. It’s effectively a form of rent-stabilisation that makes living there more affordable over time in comparison to private rental. There’s also a high degree of resident control, as residents collectively own the building through the cooperative.

Most of our group come from a design and development background. We probably didn’t anticipate that the bulk of our work so far would be focused on that enabling environment I mentioned – finding ways to replicate the access to land and finance that allowed cooperatives to become a key piece of the housing equation in Zürich. We’ve made a lot of progress. We know the conditions that will enable a pilot to work, and we’ve had a really positive response when presenting the model in focus groups. What we’d really like to see now is governments supporting community-led models like this in some of the same ways they do social and affordable housing. Not through one-off capital grants, but by expanding access to low-interest finance. It would be a catalytic investment in a scalable model that can make a real difference.

HT: The Middle Ground model aims to integrate a mix of uses alongside housing that gives back to the neighbourhood. Why is this aspect important to you?

AK: So much of the public conversation at the moment is about housing targets. A good neighbourhood comes alive though through an ecology of activities and relationships that thrive on proximity.

An example I love are the innenhöfe—the inner courtyards—of late 19th-century perimeter block housing in Zürich, which were a place for manual work and making. The boundaries between the domestic and the industrious were blurred. Today, those pavilion-style workshops have been occupied by creative businesses and even small-scale retail and hospitality operators. Living and working coexist at a neighbourhood scale in a really organic way. The porosity of the innenhöfe opens up the private life of the block to gentle forms of public use.

Most neighbourhoods in Melbourne are much more functionally divided. But infill densification is an opportunity to disrupt that pattern. And not just ground-floor cafes! A big part of my consulting practice is working with development and design teams to develop use strategies that will improve the urban outcomes of neighbourhood-scale projects. Accommodating a mix of uses isn’t just a question of architecture. Spaces obviously need to be fit-for-purpose. And the more flexible over time, the better. Like I mentioned at the beginning though, urban strategy is multi-layered. Cost is important. And cost is inherently connected to the development strategy and investment model.

It’s the reason why cooperative development is a great fit for the provision of space for uses beyond housing. For example, affordable creative space, which inner Melbourne is losing rapidly. It’s ultimately about long-term local investment in the city and the recirculation of social profits. What I’m really interested in at the moment is how we can think more creatively beyond just inserting discrete uses beneath a block of apartments. How could we connect those uses in a more tangible way to the life of the resident community?

One of the best projects I’ve visited in the last year is A House for Artists in London. There’s so much to say about it, from the intelligent design by Apparata, to the innovative partnership between the Borough of Barking and Dagenham, arts organisation Create London, and the Mayor of London. But the headline idea—to provide affordable living and working spaces for artists and their families in return for delivering free creative programs for the neighbourhood from the ground floor community hall—is a model I could imagine applying in so many different ways. It’s really inspiring.

HT: Agreed – a great example of a mixed-use development delivering value for the neighbourhood. Thank you for sharing your time and insights, Alexis.

AK: Thanks for having me.