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expensive to build in remote rural locations than in more urbanised situations where infrastructure already exists to serve larger population bases.
This perspective looks to the individual price of a new property which, in isolation, is effectively a bespoke home, often designed and built to a non-standard design and invariably expensive to construct. This is a very different challenge to that faced by small, remotely situated rural communities. Here, existing homes can be few in number and are frequently older, inadequately insulated, and poorly constructed properties, meaning high running and maintenance costs.
But is the rural housing market really too small? Certainly, the individual home or the small numbers required in a single community at any given time would suggest this, but the cumulative market tells a different story. Every council authority in the country is obliged to maintain forward projections of housing demand within the boundaries of their statutory local plans and to indicate the ideal timescale by which new housing in each community should be delivered. For some time, however, many authorities have attached conditions to planning permissions that require a proportion of affordable homes be included in any new housing development. The cost of this, though, is simply loaded into the price of the homes for sale, causing further inflation in local property values. Irrespective of the propriety or otherwise of this approach, it is a stratagem that offers no benefits for remote rural locations.
HOW CAN TIMBER HELP?
The delivery of rural housing comprises three inter-related challenges:
• land ownership • appropriate construction solutions • access to finance.
It may seem counter-intuitive, but increasing numbers of remote rural communities have three assets capable of addressing these issues:
• the opportunity to own the land themselves (community buy-outs, particularly in
Scotland, our pilot project area);
• the possibility that the land acquired is already forested with production species;
• the potential to apply the community’s own labour to manufacturing and construction
processes that embrace the use of locally- grown timber to produce the energy- efficient structures of new affordable homes and other community facilities.
TAKING THE FACTORY TO THE FOREST The challenge is how best to use the timber from the local forest. The application of MMC and off-site manufacture (OSM)
approaches normally implies fabrication in a distant factory which, for rural communities, means expensive transportation from/ to their area. Buying-in skills can also be costly, whilst conventional construction is weather dependent. The answer lies in taking OSM onsite by making a modern, high- quality, high-value construction product locally from timber sourced from nearby forests: effectively, a mobile factory solution embracing mobile sawmills, transportable solar powered kilns, CNC machines and other equipment capable of manufacturing the necessary building components. In this scenario, dowel-laminated timber
(DLT) is an eminently appropriate fabrication method. This non-glued solid laminate timber technology may be less well known than other forms of mass timber but, in the right circumstances (one of which being rural communities), its potential value is immense. Most importantly, local manufacture at small scale is a benefit not available with glued mass timber systems such as cross- laminated timber. DLT, by contrast, requires no glues, nails or screws: the moisture content of the wood does all the work. In DLT, the layers of a timber panel are held together by hardwood dowels inserted into holes in the softwood lamellae. When produced manually, however, the dowel insertion process can be extremely time-consuming. Creating a mobile machine/press radically alters this to an efficient production method, automating the dowel insertion process to deliver structurally strong, stable and manageable-size panels. Making high-quality solid panels in this way has the potential to raise the value of the timber employed and thus deliver a positive contribution to local economies as well as creating new opportunities for skills development and sustainable employment.
MAKING IT HAPPEN
Most of the proposed elements of the mobile factory are already commercially available: only the transportable solar powered kilns and the portable DLT press need to be developed. The technology for these exists – the Association of Scottish Hardwood Sawmiller (ASHS) has done sterling work on container-based kilning solutions and the challenge remaining is to make them more easily transportable. Similarly, there are more than 20 DLT manufacturing facilities operating in Europe, producing various types of panel (stacked plank, cross-laminated or diagonally laminated): the issue is how to reduce the automated fabrication process in size in order for it to be portable and manufacture small- dimension panels that are easily manipulable by a small number of people.
These are innovation challenges currently being addressed by the Build Back Rural project, a Timber Design Initiatives Ltd
research and development response to the changing circumstances in which rural communities currently exist. Traditional construction has proved itself impotent in the delivery of genuinely affordable housing in the remoter parts of the country, so will the project provide a practical and economically-viable solution? Time will tell, but with work on this now well-advanced, remote rural communities throughout the UK and from as far away as Alaska are already showing interest in what, for them, could well be the transformational ‘new normal’ they’ve long been waiting for. ■
Above left: Manual insertion of dowels in stacked board form of DLT
Above right: Curved wall assembly – panels don’t only need to be used orthogonally
FURTHER INFORMATION To find out more, visit
www.build-back-rural.com
www.ttjonline.com | September/October 2021 | TTJ
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