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Housing is too important an issue to ignore but it runs deeper than just population numbers and bricks and mortar. A home is just as much about the people who live within it, the communities that surround it and neighbourhoods they evolve. Attracting and retaining talent is a key part of building our city.

And while Birmingham’s Big City Plan, goes someway in tackling the housing crisis – are the council concerned with creating everyday houses or, living, breathing, functional homes? This is one of the issues I’ll be talking about at Birmingham Made Me, on June 14.

It’s positive to see that in the first quarter of 2013 house building starts in the º£½ÇÊÓƵ are up by four per cent, according to the Department of Communities and Local Government’s latest report, but housing development in the º£½ÇÊÓƵ is still taking on too much of a commodity approach. In our cities we are increasingly faced with a lack of space but I firmly believe that the solution of the housing crisis will not be achieved by even smaller dwellings.

In 2011 the BBC reported that the average older º£½ÇÊÓƵ home (including older and new build) is 85 sq m and has 5.2 rooms, with an average of 16.3 sq m per room. Whereas in 2011 the average new home in the º£½ÇÊÓƵ was 76sq m, had 4.8 rooms, with an average of 15.8 sq m per room. With these figures still reducing and family groups getting bigger the actual living space is well below what’s recommended.

Looking to Europe, the same report estimates that on average new homes in Ireland are 15 per cent larger, in the Netherlands 53 per cent larger and in Denmark a huge 80 per cent larger.

‘Excellent ordinary housing’ is not about the exterior, the exotic, nor creating landmark buildings but about finding ways to create both individual and collective spaces which are generous in size, flexible and can fulfil the needs of those who live there, as well as becoming more environmentally friendly and eventually each new ‘ordinary’ home being zero carbon.

In terms of Glenn Howells Architects’ approach to designing housing, we try to devise buildings which are part of the bigger picture and that don’t work in isolation within a city or area. Time is a key dimension which is often overlooked in architectural design, after all, architects want their buildings to last. This is why connections need to be made throughout the whole design process to identify how the building can be used in a variety of different ways.

Previously in Birmingham city centre, we have taken the approach to build and then deconstruct to make space to build again, which if we continue will leave us with a sporadic cityscape where nothing works together, both visually and as a community. The local authority plans to complete an extra 80,000 homes by 2031, to meet the needs of Birmingham’s ever growing population, but can we predict the functionality we’ll need from our homes in the years to come? If you’d told me even 10 years ago that I would be able to watch TV or search the internet on my mobile phone anywhere in the world, I don’t think I would have believed you.