Ikea: Australia’s co-living future?

IKEA living
Visual renders of Ikea’s ‘sustainable glimpse’ into the future

Swedish flat-pack giant Ikea has a vision for the future of Australia, and it’s not what the average punter thinks is going to happen.

The furniture and homewares retailer has launched a new retail concept alongside the publication of its annual People and Planet Positive Report, designed around the concept of co-living and the projection that Australia’s population will balloon to over 70 million in the next century.

Ikea thinks that high-density living and environmental pressures will radically change the way Aussies live, eat and work by the year 2100, and they’re going to be giving consumers a glimpse next Wednesday with a two-day “shared dining experience” in Sydney called the Growroom.

Designed last year by Ikea’s Space10 innovation lab in Copenhagen, the Growroom is an “open-source urban farm pavilion” designed to showcase future-living in an urban environment, featuring a shared “growing and grazing space”.

It’s a far cry from the traditional Australian dream of a standalone family home in the suburbs, but Ikea Australia’s sustainability manager Kate Ringvall reckons Aussies need to be more open to the concept.

“Our research shows that Australians need to be more open minded to new ways of living. We are at a pivotal moment in history that we can create cities that suit our future, as opposed to inheriting legacies from past generations,” she told Inside Retail.

IKEAs research shows that 43 per cent of Aussies are still holding onto the standalone home, with only 32 per cent of those surveyed by the company believing we’ll be ready for new living scenarios that drastically increased population would create.

56 per cent don’t think a co-living community would work in Australia, but Ringvall said change could tackle problems like housing affordability and reduce the nation’s carbon footprint.

IKEAl“Nature will feature more in our city-scapes and inside the home, we will live in smaller spaces with clever storage solutions, and our environments will be increasingly green and clean, with a focus on locally cultivated food, carbon neutrality, water, energy capture and new types of business models,” Ringvall predicted.

Ikea is looking to get ahead of the curve with product changes that will excite future generations of shoppers, hoping to change current attitudes towards its vision for the future with demonstrations that bring the possibilities to life.

IKEAll

 

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