Modular housing and homelessness

The report maps 33 UK schemes providing 808 units of temporary accommodation for people who have experienced homelessness. It distinguishes purpose-built modular housing from converted shipping containers and considers potential benefits alongside limitations and barriers.

That distinction matters. ExoSett’s current engineering examples commonly use the external dimensions of an ISO 668 1CCC 20-foot High Cube container as a useful, well-understood reference envelope. ExoSett does not, however, prescribe that size, and a purpose-built accommodation module is not a converted shipping container.

Module dimensions are a design choice. If a module is to operate as a cassette—manufactured, transported, installed, removed and handled—its size and mass must remain manageable through those processes. This is an engineering and design trade-off, not a fixed dimensional rule.

The report raises concerns about small modular dwellings: most schemes for which dimensions were available fell below nationally described space standards. It is a warning against treating a small modular unit as synonymous with good housing.

An ExoSett dwelling may occupy one or several accommodation modules and frame cells. The 1CCC-sized module shown in current material is an engineering example, not a proposed universal dwelling size. Size, layout, accessibility, daylight, ventilation, thermal comfort, privacy, storage and amenity remain architectural design questions distinct from the system’s structural modularity.

The separate Design pages on accommodation design and location develop these principles.

Off-site manufacture can shorten work on site, but land acquisition, planning, finance, infrastructure and approvals remain substantial parts of delivery. ExoSett should distinguish rapid manufacture, installation and later reconfiguration from the duration of an entire housing project.

The same caution applies to cost. The report finds insufficient robust whole-project evidence for the common assumption that modular housing is consistently cheaper. Economy, reuse, maintainability, adaptability and reduced disruption may be ExoSett design objectives, but actual project and whole-life costs must be demonstrated rather than assumed. ExoSett should not promise “cheap housing”.

The report considers “meanwhile” land and notes that readily available sites can be poorly connected to shops, work, schools, services and community life. Adaptability does not require accepting a poor location simply because a system is modular.

An ExoSett accommodation frame could instead be long-lived infrastructure in a good place, whose accommodation can change over time.

This does not mean every ExoSett building must be permanent or urban, nor does the system solve land availability. It means location is itself an important design decision.

Temporary and modular sites still need electricity, water, wastewater and communications. The service frame is intended not only to make utilities accessible, but to help their provision evolve independently from accommodation. A project might move from pumped and tanked wastewater to a mains sewer, from local generation to mains electricity, or from satellite communications such as Starlink to fibre. Enabling such changes without redesigning accommodation is a design objective, not a demonstrated capability.

The report identifies movability as a possible benefit, but at the time of the research its authors had found no unit moved from one occupied site to another. ExoSett should not imply that a cassette would normally leave one occupied building and immediately enter another.

A more realistic intended lifecycle is manufacture → installation → occupation → removal → refurbishment, inspection or adaptation → subsequent deployment or reuse. Removal creates an opportunity to work on a cassette away from an occupied building; reuse need not mean moving an unchanged dwelling directly between buildings. ExoSett has not yet demonstrated this lifecycle in practice.

The report raises questions of thermal comfort, space, communal facilities, play space, access to amenities, stigma and local opposition. A building system cannot settle them by itself. ExoSett should enable architects and building designers to create good places to live, without prescribing one architectural solution.

Design must address dwellings and their wider setting: suitable space and layout, accessibility, daylight and outlook, ventilation and comfort, privacy and storage, shared spaces, circulation and the relationship to the surrounding place.

Resident evidence from the Cambridge Newmarket Road project is encouraging, but the report associates positive outcomes with private independent accommodation together with effective support services. ExoSett might provide useful physical infrastructure within some housing programmes; policy, support, management, funding, location and human services remain essential.

The objective is not to maximise modularity, minimise dwelling size or make buildings temporary. It is to make good accommodation and useful building infrastructure capable of changing over time.

Read the full report (PDF), return to Research and Reading, or explore ExoSett design.