Your Voice: A radical rethinking of the idea of home

Inspired by the recent announcement of the futuristic, zero carbon, smart city called “The Line” at NEOM by HRH Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, I, like many others, was astonished by the revolutionary concept of urban space. As NEOM is the land of dreamers, I’ve been dreaming about a new way of living, where the relationship between humans and urban spaces is being redefined. 

Coming from a software development background and a cloud computing world that focuses on reusability and maximizing the use of resources by providing multitenant infrastructure-as-a-service, it is envisaged that work-life balance will be improved significantly by adopting a housing-as-a-service concept. 

The concept of co-living and co-working could be established by helping inhabitants, who share work and domestic facilities, to maximize efficient use of landscape by minimizing underutilized office and residential building space. 

Sharing the cost of living 

In other words, instead of renting a whole flat with many rooms and facilities, tenants would select the minimum required services (e.g., bedroom, bathroom, etc.) and share other facilities and appliances (e.g., office space, gym, cinema, storage, laundry, games rooms, etc.), that are mostly underutilized, and pay on a per-use basis. Duality of ownership and usage helps in reducing the total cost of ownership by moving houses from being a commodity to services, allowing for shared costs of acquisition, operation, and maintenance. 

It would improve community safety and security, reduce the need of external human resources and helpers, and decrease material possessions without impacting the quality of life.

Most importantly, housing-as-a-service would allow for sharing without compromising convenience, increasing bonding and interaction within a community that is built around nature and not roads. It would also make it financially affordable. In addition, this would help in reducing landscapes needed, allowing for making all required facilities, including workspaces, to be within a 5-minute walking distance. This increases the walkability in the city, and thereby improve the health of all society. This, of course, is magnified with the vision of having the city with zero cars and full reliance on renewable energy.

Our kids are having a better future, thanks to the visionaries of our country, and to HRH, for making dreams become reality!

Your Voice reflects the thoughts and opinions of the writer, and not necessarily those of the publication.