Citizen One S2:E2 – 8 Minutes 20 Seconds – Housing After Banking

What if housing were designed not for banks, but for photons? This deceptively simple question sits at the heart of Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong’s work, and in this episode of Citizen One: Exploring Our Urban Future, they join Douglas Stuart McDaniel to explore how light, not leverage, might reshape the foundations of our cities.Their book, 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking, takes its title from the time it takes sunlight to travel from the sun to the earth. It’s a cosmic measure of abundance that reframes housing as energy infrastructure rather than financial collateral. For over a century, mortgage debt, land speculation, and securitization have dictated how homes are built and who gets to live in them. But Bell and Seong argue that in an age of climate crisis and financial fragility, sunlight itself may be the more profound constraint—and the greater opportunity.Personal Memory, Planetary FuturesThe cosmic is always personal. Bell recalls his father’s NASA work in the 1970s, capturing X-ray images of the sun and noting that a solar flare could generate enough energy to power civilization for 2,000 years. It took him decades to fully grasp that lesson: climate change, urban heat sinks, and the precarity of fossil fuels were already being observed before the politics of climate entered public life. That memory threads through the book’s central metaphor: fossil fuels that took millions of years to form have been consumed in just 150 years, while the sun’s energy flows to us continuously, freely, and without depletion.From Fragility to AbundanceHousing today, according to Bell and Seong, is propped up by central banks holding trillions in securitized assets. Land values have skyrocketed past housing values since the 1970s, outpacing the cost of actual structures and embedding scarcity into the DNA of our cities. Housing, as Eunjeong puts it, is a “fragile system,” one that depends on leverage and debt at unsustainable scales. Yet against this fragility stands the constancy of the sun—renewable energy that arrives every eight minutes, inexhaustible and replenishing. Designing with photons shifts the conversation from scarcity to abundance, from fragile debt to resilient infrastructure.The Singularity of Housing FinanceBell and Seong also describe financialized housing as its own kind of singularity—an event horizon where debt, derivatives, and central bank interventions spiral beyond sustainability. Numbers themselves bend space until stability becomes illusion. Like a black hole at the center of urban life, the gravitational pull of housing finance threatens to consume itself. The question becomes: what lies beyond that horizon, and can the light of solar abundance bend the trajectory toward a new civic future?Architecture in Space and TimeAt its core, this is not just an economic critique but a philosophical reorientation. Architecture has always been bound up with space and time—whether through the Renaissance canvas, Picasso’s Cubist experiments, or Einstein’s relativity. Bell and Seong extend this lineage by asking what it means to design when your home is literally recharged by the sun every eight minutes. Housing becomes spacetime choreography: shadow as a design tool, roofs as collectors, facades as thermodynamic instruments. The house ceases to be a fixed asset and instead becomes a living system.Automation and Employment FuturesThis reframing of housing also intersects with the future of work. As automation accelerates, employment itself becomes less stable, and the wage-based housing model—where mortgages are tethered to decades of salaried labor—grows more precarious. Imagine robots fabricating walls while displaced workers become stewards of solar grids—automation dismantles one model of housing but seeds another. Housing, in this light, is not simply shelter but a platform for employment transition—where automation displaces old labor models but also seeds new ones, from energy stewardship to urban technology ecosystems.Reimagining the Solar PolisOut of this emerges the vision of the “solar polis”—a civic imaginarium where zoning follows wattage, not acreage, and homes become nodes in a distributed energy grid. It’s not just about efficiency or green design. It’s about rethinking citizenship, equity, and urban form around an abundant and democratic energy source. The solar polis is both speculative and practical: it asks us to imagine new forms of density and distribution, new settlement patterns, and a new contract between energy, housing, and civic life.Beyond Prefab: Housing as Advanced ManufacturingCrucially, Bell and Seong argue this future won’t come from incremental prefab housing models. Instead, it requires the leap of advanced manufacturing and material science, the same ecosystems that produced aerospace and consumer electronics. Imagine chemically tempered glass that heats and cools, walls that act as energy storage, ...