FutureCraft

A short guide.

What it is

FutureCraft is an open-source platform that helps cities build housing that fits the place it stands in - the climate, the rules, the materials nearby, the people who will live there - without each city having to figure it all out from scratch.

It does not build houses. It builds the digital layer underneath, and gives that layer away free to cities, citizens, architects, and engineers. Manufacturers of building products pay to plug in.

It works with around 5,000 cities across 18 territories, alongside the European Commission, G20, ASEAN, and the UN.

The problem

About 1.1 billion people live in slums or informal settlements. In the fastest-growing cities, around 60% of homes are built without permits, without quality checks, often without safe materials. Most new houses globally are not built by construction companies - they are built informally, by the people who will live in them.

You might think this is a money problem. It is not. The EU set aside EUR 378 billion to address this between 2021 and 2027. By mid-2025, only 11% had been spent. In England and Wales, over GBP 9 billion of developer contributions sits unused.

Think about it. Society has put real money on the table to solve this. The money is not being spent. The houses are not being built. Healthier homes are entirely possible right now - and they are still not happening. That is not a funding problem. That is a wiring problem.

What is missing is a working path from a city’s actual conditions to a building that fits those conditions, can be financed, can be permitted, can be built, and can be trusted on its carbon performance. Every project starts almost from scratch.

Think about it. An architect draws a plan. The plan does not match the site, so it is redrawn. It does not match the local code, so it is redrawn again. It does not match what the structural engineer needs, so the engineer redraws their part, which changes the architect’s part, which changes the budget, which changes the design. Imagine downloading an app on your phone and having to change your wallpaper, your passwords, and the operating system before it would run. That is how every building gets made today. About a quarter of the cost of a building is paying for that loop.

FutureCraft removes the loop.

How it works

The platform reads a place - its rules, its climate, its carbon budget, its site. It fits patterns from a shared, open library of over 450 real, built projects to that place. It produces files an architect, an engineer, a factory, or a permit office can use immediately: drawings, fabrication files, carbon calculations, compliance paperwork.

The original designers of each pattern are credited and earn a royalty every time it is used. The cities own their data. Nothing is locked behind a proprietary tool.

Everyone on the platform agrees to four commitments: Honesty, Openness, Safety, Trust. They are written down as concrete rules - no hidden conflicts of interest, no selling cities’ data, no pretending a building is greener than it is, no AI decision without a human checking it at the point that matters.

Proof it works

The first AI-designed-from-context house is built and standing in Brasschaat, Belgium. It is called Toekomstschip - “future craft.” It used LIDAR, ground radar, neural networks, and digital twins to design itself for its exact site. It is circular, nature-based, and it proved a specific thing: about 25% of the cost of building a house is repeated figuring-out, and that 25% goes to zero when the figuring-out is open-source.

From those humble beginnings, what started as one house in one Belgian town is turning into a global movement. Projects and pilots are taking shape across Europe, Asia, Africa, and beyond - schools, neighbourhoods, public buildings, data centres. Different places, different needs, same underlying platform. Dots on a map that are starting to connect.

Building relationally

Cities, architects, residents, and manufacturers do not use FutureCraft. They build it. A global garden starting with what we have today, tended together to become what it will be tomorrow. Every pattern in the Commons, every city that joins, every manufacturer that calibrates, every citizen who helps shape a design - builds value, meaning, and knowledge that accumulate as a shared inheritance.

Think about it. Real change does not come from technology alone. It comes from better relationships. That is why the Digital Housing Commons is not just a library of patterns. It is a living ecosystem where people position themselves, make real commitments, and create shared meaning. Open-source, for us, is not only a licence. It is a way of working based on trust and reciprocity.

The platform measures its success not only by efficiency and scale, but by the quality of the relationships it helps create - between cities, between communities, between the people who design and the people who live in what gets built.

Building lighter on the land

Concrete and steel are heavy in carbon and heavy on the site. When a typical site is “prepared” for construction, everything living on it dies first - the trees, the topsoil, the soil microbiome. It is the building-industry default.

Think about it. That is the equivalent of wiping your phone every time you want to install an app. It is not necessary. It is just the cheapest way to build if you have not done the upstream thinking. The upstream thinking is what FutureCraft does.

The platform favours engineered wood and nature-based materials wherever the structure allows. The carbon those materials lock into a building is what funds the platform - measured against conservative baselines, verified independently, recorded publicly. Build lighter, build healthier, and the building itself pays for the system that designed it.

Building openly and freely

Cities never pay. Citizens never pay. Architects and engineers earn royalties on what gets built.

Manufacturers pay - not for advertising, but to have their real product data calibrated into the system, so when a building needs a specific component the platform can pick a real, named, available, low-carbon one. The fees are five to twenty times cheaper than what manufacturers currently spend chasing project leads.

Think about it. Making things open and free is the easy part. The hard part is making them open and free and still funding the work - paying the architects, supporting the cities, keeping the lights on. Imagine if every time you took a selfie you had to hire a photographer. Open-source tech removed that. But for it to work, someone has to figure out where the money does come from. That is most of the design work behind FutureCraft.

Construction companies cannot invest in FutureCraft. The platform stays completely neutral on who builds what, where.

Where to start

Read the Declaration to End The Stone Age at digitalhousingcommons.org. Read the position paper Buildings that Arise. Read the HOST://protocol. They are written to be read.

Students and school teams can enter HACC - the Hackable Architecture Catalyst and Competition - which opens November 2026 in Barcelona and runs through 2027 with the European Association for Architectural Education. Designs that come out of it feed into the open library that real cities then build from.

People who want to work on this - on context-aware AI, regulatory data, parametric design, materials science, open-source governance, urban policy - the platform is staffing up from late 2026 onwards.

Cities and regions join by signing the Declaration. Sign-up is light, and someone from the team follows up personally on what participation looks like in your context.

Architects engage via hackablearchitecture.org from 2027 onwards. Designs are attributed; royalties flow when they get used.

Manufacturers engage via futurecraft.earth, where the onboarding loop runs cohort by cohort.

Construction companies can inform themselves through both sites. Projects come online from 2027 onwards, and as the platform’s governance works, the door opens to anyone who can build to spec.

Where this leads

Think about it. Why should building a house be hard? We have the technology. AI, robotics, a connected planet, materials we know how to grow back. Within a few decades, the question should not be “can we afford to build it” but “where do you want it, and who is it for.” A school here, housing there, a hospital on that hillside. Robots carry out the work. The designs improve every time they are used. The communities they are built for shape what gets built. Digital superpowers, for everyone, applied to where people live.

Buildings should arise.

Where to find it

futurecraft.earth - the company
digitalhousingcommons.org - the Declaration, the charter, the vision paper
hackablearchitecture.org - HACC, the 2027 programme

The Declaration to End The Stone Age

We, the undersigned, will together change the way we build our cities by creating:

01 Inclusive, Human-Centred, AI-Supported, Cooperatively Designed Open-Source Neighbourhoods

02 Free, Accessible, Open-Source, Forkable, and Attributable Designs and Intellectual Property in a Digital Commons

03 Nature-Based, SDG-Driven, Healthy, and Hackable Architecture

04 Digital-First, Machine-Readable, Production-Ready Digital Twins and Data Spaces for Interoperable Fabrication

05 Open-Knowledge, Open-Hardware, and Open-Access Spaces for Effective, Aware, and Respectful Cooperative Construction

06 Open-Source, Physically Auditable, Sovereignly Governed Carbon Accounting for Sustainable Procurement

Governed by the cities and regions of the world,
free for everyone, everywhere, forever.

Name: _______

Title: ________

City / Region: ______

Country: ___________

Signature: _________

FutureCraft Open Source Habitats. Profile, May 2026.