Page 34 - 03_April-2025

Another cost is, well, cost. About half the price of a
new home in Edmonton today, he points out, covers the
lot. “The wicked problem is land,” says Johns. But if no
one’s making any more of it to help keep prices down,
and the city intends for 50 per cent of new housing to
come from infill, can that problem be solved? “It can,”
Johns insists. “I did.”
He calls his solution “Baakfil.” And if it works as he
hopes, almost no one will notice.
“Serendipity” led to his epiphany, says Johns. Around
the mid 2010s, “I was getting tired — mentally tired. I
wasn’t feeling optimistic about what was happening in
the profession.”
The homebuilding industry was — and still is, in
Johns’ opinion — mass-producing templated houses, no
architects required. From Johns’s view as then-chancellor
of the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, architects
weren’t rallying to change a process he saw to be inflating
home prices and, through infill, often altering the culture
of established neighbourhoods.
“It was a moment of crisis for me,” says Johns. “I’ve
always wanted to make a difference.” But he wasn’t.
He needed a change, which arrived at a conference
where he happened to cross paths with with John Brown,
dean of the University of Calgary School of Architecture,
Planning and Landscape. The university was launching a
doctorate in design studies in which participants could
examine their past work and, from it, develop something
entirely new.
Johns realized this was his chance to step outside
the profession and think deeply about it, and about his
role in it. “I was able to focus,” Johns says of the nearly
four years of study that followed. “I was able to create
new knowledge.”
That knowledge was Baakfil — Back Alley Advantage
Kinship Family Integrated Living.
“I was able to zoom-in after having determined that
the cost of land is the biggest barrier to affordability,”
says Johns. “Nobody (had) ever acknowledged it …
The cost just gets passed on.”
Removing land from the equation drives Johns’s innova-
tion to make the most of what’s already on the lot. It starts
by subdividing a piece of the lot. “Keep the existing house
and build something in the back,” he explains.
SOME OF
BARRY’S
WORK
His new book,
Effective Urban
Densification,
is a reimagining
of infill’s role in
meeting housing
needs
34 EDify. APRIL.25
Also, keep the original owners in that
house. They temporarily partner with a
developer, contributing the land space
but retaining ownership. Together, they
build a Baakfil unit: a roughly 24-by-24-
foot (garage-sized), net-zero-ready house
accessed by the back alley of a corner or
other good-sized lot. When the Baakfil
house sells — for “well under” the current
average detached home price because it’s
on a smaller plot of land — the partners
share the proceeds.
“
 A MONOLITH TOWERING
ABOVE POST-SECOND WORLD
WAR BUNGALOWS CANNOT
‘RESPECT’ THE CHARACTER
OF A NEIGHBOURHOOD; IT’S
DISRUPTIVE.”
To Johns’s delight, an architect is
integral. Orientation and layout of each
Baakfil home is entirely customizable. He
couldn’t have it any other way.
“If any two of your buildings look the
same,” Johns says, “there’s something
wrong.”
Johns calls this “gentle densification.”
It leaves the streetscape unchanged and
even animates back alleys while boosting
housing stock. By Johns’s math, if 25 per
cent of new development was by Baakfil for
25 years, it could accommodate 250,000
Edmontonians in mature neighbourhoods.
Kevin Taft would like that. The former
MLA and now community advocate with
the Coalition for Better Infill feels that
city of Edmonton zoning bylaw changes
have amounted to “deregulation” of the
infill industry, allowing for “poorly
thought-out” builds.
His governor
General’s medal-
winning Advanced
Technology
Centre that
disappears into
a hillside