Vakansa to Building Green CPH 2025
29 oktober 2025Why the most sustainable building is the one that never has to be built
Ony my way to my first in-person international appearance at the Building Green CPH DK conference in Denmark, where I will talk about quite an important topic:
Why the most sustainable building is the one that never has to be built.
About 10 years ago, a now-retired real estate colleague of mine, Jerker Nyblom, said the words, “The most sustainable building is the one that doesn’t get built.”
Words that got so fixated into my brain, as they encompassed everything I believed in and that science had told us – in one sentence. A sentence that became a mantra.
When I gave my TEDxUppsalaUniversity talk in 2016, I explained how ”If we keep designing and building our cities as if we have unlimited resources, we will construct the destruction of our world”.
Not to be alarmist, but to state a fact – that our cities are resource consuming entities – parasites, living off the host – our planet. Parasitic cities, that us humans have created and that we now have to transform into self-sufficient symbiotic organism, by exercising circular and sharing principles.
Instead, we keep on constructing for demolition and demolish in order to construct – an endless cycle…and not the good one, consuming 50% of all globally exploited resources in a single year and generate up to 40% of all solid waste in the world.
All the while, large swaths of vacant and partially vacant buildings and infrastructure are everywhere in our cities.
The untapped potential of time vacancies and space vacancies for resource efficiency
In my TEDx talk I called them time vacancies and space vacancies – the untapped potential in our cities.
Space vacancies: ”Unsused walls, roofs, lawns and other surfaces that could be developed with sustainable solutions”
Three years after the TEDx, seeing that nothing really happened besides the growing coworking sector, I decided to found the facilities sharing platform Vakansa in order to make use of the time vacancies. A platform to help tenants share spaces with each other, instead of paying a 100% of the rent and use spaces 10-20% of the time. Sharing principles that leads to economically, envrionmental and social benefits through resource efficiency. Benefits that we’re starting to measure extensivly and working with new KPI:s in order to help tenants and property owners to work more data driven.
A platform with the vision to contribute to a sustainable real estate sector, where the need for facilities are met, without the need for new construction. Helping tenants share spaces and make use of them from dusk to dawn!
A company still growing and being recognized by actors such as The Nordic Council of ministers for our work.
Unsustabanable demolitions and uneccessary construction of new buildings
But in 2022, I got pissed off – seeing all the demolitions in our Swedish cities. No amount of sharing could compensate for the unbelievably unsustainable practices our sector carried out.
Inspired, as so many times before, by the biography of my greatest idol – Jane Jacobs (Wrestling with Moses: How Jane Jacobs Took On New York’s Master Builder and Transformed the American City) – I got reignited by the ways she mobilized and organized people in order to save parts of New York from being demolished. Stories I only had gotten small glimpses of in her fantastic book, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” I’ve reread many times.
So I acted.
I started the Hug the Building campaign (Krama byggnaden!)—a campaign with the goal of stopping demolitions of functioning buildings.
Accompanied by actors such as Renoveringsraseriet, ACAN Sverige, and 20 other organizations, we persued change.
We didn’t get many signatures in our petition, but we got an audience with leaders of the city councils of Stockholms stad, Malmö stad, Göteborgs Stad, and Uppsala kommun.
We even met the Minister for Infrastructure and Housing, Andreas Carlson.
Since then we’ve seen a shift for even more reuse in construction projects, even more transformations of buildings and demolition plans that are being thrown in the bin.
But we still have a long way to go – according to my estimate I did in 2022, we should have been reducing the amount of constructed sqm (using a residential building for my example) by 4,5 million each year since 2022. We havn’t and so the cumulative consequens of continued emissions is that we have to stop even more this year to compensate.
Byggestopbevægelsen, House Europe and Reduction roadmap
Today, we see initiatives such as the anti-demolition and renovations camapign House of Europe, the stop constructing campaign ByggestopBevægelsen and pais agreement roadmap for the real estate and construction sector Reduction roadmap growing and continuing the struggle!
Showing us what scaling for enough really means.
With my startup Vakansa I want to show the untapped potential of time vacancies. Because if we only double the useage of our facilities from 10% to 20% when it comes to office spaces or 20% to 40% when it comes to school – we wont need to construct anything at all.
That’s why the most sustainable building is the one that never has to be built – because we still have to learn to use what we have sustainably and realise that we already have all the square meters we need.
Looking forward in meeting everyone at the conference!
Vakansa är en lokaldelningsplattform med en vision om att främja en hållbar stadsutveckling, där vi möter människors lokalbehov, utan att det ska byggas nytt. Vår mission är att synliggöra och tillgängliggöra olika lokaltyper för alla möjliga tillfällen.
Har ni lokaler ni önskar hyra eller hyra ut? Klicka nedan och välkommen till Vakansa!