Description
In contrast to a review of the past – where the distance of time allows for a more accurate reflection on which historical, societal, and economic developments or design strategies challenged existing paradigms and contributed significantly to the development of housing – the present can only be described in tendencies. What is discussed here are some of the most important challenges facing urban housing today. Concrete examples are offered as illustrations of potential design solutions.
The Social Segregation of Cities
An increasing section of the population is threatened with exclusion from the real-estate market – whether as renters or buyers – because they simply cannot afford the rapidly accelerating cost of housing. This is not only due to the global financial crisis of 2007, but also to the increasing attractiveness of real estate as an investment, the often-cited gap in income development, and even factors like online vacation rental platforms that increasingly deprive cities attractive to tourists of sufficient residential space. The current scarcity of affordable housing is also further aggravated in Western industrial societies by the steady growth in the attractiveness of city life – with simultaneous high and still increasing numbers of empty properties in many rural regions. The situation is made more acute by processes of gentrification, where in well-located but often neglected neighborhoods, socially and ethnically diverse residents are pushed out by groups with higher incomes.
This development requires counter measures, that with more inclusive concepts attempt to stem the trend toward social segregation within cities – which on a societal level can also be viewed critically – by creating new models for affordable housing, whether in the form of new building types, new property development models, through the renewal and expansion of social housing programs, cautious forms of increasing inner-city density as well as renewed, contemporary research into “housing for the minimum subsistence level.” The inhabitants to be considered are extremely heterogeneous and span from singles, couples, families, retirees, and immigrants to groups on the edge of society such as the homeless
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Demographic Change: Generations
While the increasing quantitative imbalance between generations is above all a social and economic problem, specific alternative housing strategies are also required for the different generations – with foresight into the different residential forms and locations inhabitants prefer during each phase of life or the fact that future generations may simply be much smaller in number.
Families
In particular the family – with the nuclear family as the main object of housing standardization research for a long time – has become more diversified over the years. Besides the traditional model, there exist single-parent households, patchwork families, and multi-generational living situations, among many others. Familial relations and constellations are changing much quicker and more often than in previous times, thus increasing the demands on the flexibility of both the individual apartment floor plan, as well as the way in which adjacent units can be connected to or separated from one another
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Baby Boomers
As the baby boomer generation ages, the number of retirees is going to dramatically increase in the coming years. A growing elderly population in many societies will have to be countered with a considerable expansion of appropriate floor plan typologies and forms of living that are not only suitable for this demographic development, but also take into account that seniors today increasingly prefer to live in urban areas or have other, more diverse wishes and demands than earlier generations – for instance, a preference for collective or assisted living
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Millennials
Among so-called millennials, who today range from 18 to 30 years old, a number of significant changes have also taken place: increasingly influential to where and how one lives are not only longer periods of education, a desire to first establish a career or the fact that marriage is more seldom, occurs later or not at all, while divorce rates increase, but also that in comparison to older generations they often earn considerably less and have fewer assets. While the more affluent segment often lives alone in 2- to-3-room apartments, reflective of the more general trend toward more living space per person, many millennials are increasingly excluded from the real-estate market. Breaking free of conventions and increased flexibility has been helpful here: downsizing has become an acceptable option, housing has become more temporary or is fundamentally not thought about in permanent terms, establishing a household and a family is often postponed. The number of single-person residences is again on the rise and shared accommodation is – beyond one’s time as a student – increasingly more attractive
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Micro Apartments
The development of micro apartments, based on the concept of serviced apartments from the hotel sector, is also an attempt to create living space in otherwise often unaffordable central urban areas. By implementing spatial scenarios that change throughout the day and built-in, multifunctional furniture like flexible tables, folding beds or compressible wardrobes – and at times a conscious removal of ancillary functions from the apartment or an increase in available resident services – they try to systematically minimize the required space for each individual. Their diverse manifestations are inhabited by singles, business travelers or commuters: common among all iterations, however, is that living here often remains impersonal and asocial, as residents can bring in little personal furniture and it is difficult to entertain guests
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Outsourcing
While such developments are indicative of a new trend in many metropolitan areas, they are a long-established standard in the cities of Japan. The resulting building configurations are closely connected to the characteristics of their urban context, since original functions of living such as food preparation and eating have been in part “outsourced” to the public sphere. The forms of the urban and individual spheres complement and necessitate one another
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Demographic Change: Diversification
The increasingly heterogeneous nature of society has led to a broad multiplicity of ideas on possible housing forms, a multiplicity that still cannot be satisfied by the existing housing inventory
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The diversification of apartment size, layout and standards is an important criterion among all these trends when taking a variety of lifestyles and incomes into account. In order to potentially expand the choice, a broad range of different apartments – different typologies, sizes, floor plans, and standards – can be offered within one and the same project. Simultaneously, apartments with several access points allow for divisions or multiple uses
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The Dominance of the Generic
Many apartment floor plans still often functionally adhere to structures developed with the needs of the classic nuclear family in mind
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Deprogramming
Admittedly, too much diversification can also be viewed critically, at least when it results in extreme spatial and functional determination, which can only be adapted with considerable efforts – in contrast to office buildings, for example, where neutral floors are offered to accommodate the individual demands of each user. A small number of projects suggest a different path. Use-neutral buildings generate structures that incorporate the unpredictability of how the property will be utilized long-term, anticipating and allowing for uses besides housing, which are to a great degree vaguely defined and flexible and may therefore easily be reprogrammed
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Alternative models
It is often up to smaller projects to show new directions that not only follow different design strategies, but above all else endeavor to establish alternative models of cohabitation, connections between working and living, or even property development
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Co-Housing
Co-housing or cooperative building ventures take advantage of niches resulting from diversification in the real-estate market, and react to the previously mentioned economic developments, which would otherwise preclude the participants from finding affordable and adequate housing in their preferred locations. In co-housing design, users are no longer mere consumers of predefined forms of housing but become active participants in the creation of the floor plan – both in the act of inhabiting but also in the development of the buildings. Ideas on collective living are thus formulated. In these typically rather small collaborative housing projects, the inhabitants, while often assuming the economic risks for the project, have the opportunity to adapt the standard and size of their units to their income during the planning and the building stages. They are able to realize their individual concepts of living and to form a community, even prior to the completion of the building. Flexible floor plan structures with intelligently placed load-bearing, access and technical structures allow for individual floor plan solutions
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Further Developments
Global Urbanization
According to a prognosis by the United Nations, in 2050, two-thirds of humanity will be living in cities worldwide. A significant portion of the global population growth will take place in urban areas, in particular in the so-called emerging economies of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Migration patterns from rural regions to urban areas are primarily motivated by economic factors and present challenges to the demographic, economic, and social structures of both cities and rural areas
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Housing in growing and increasingly more permanent informal settlements and similar ways of living require strategies which – in lieu of demolition and forced resettlement of entire neighborhoods into places without any naturally evolved structures – build on legalization and participation, the stabilization of existing social networks, the creation of the necessary infrastructure to provide water supplies, sewers and drains, garbage removal, and more; strategies which employ simple means to design adequate and better quality housing forms with improved living conditions and economic possibilities
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Emergency Housing
The experience of recent years has shown how important it is to be prepared with adequate housing strategies for the enormous challenges posed by the immigration of refugees – whether their forced migration be due to natural catastrophes, violent conflict, economic reasons, or the consequences of climate change. Affordable, easily produced housing has to be created, but there is simultaneously a need for more long-term solutions whose structures not only anticipate their disassembly or conversion, but also whose placement and layout avoid the formation of ghettos and encourage social integration
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Asian Megacities
Given their enormous growth, Asian megacities can serve as a field for experimentation in path-breaking solutions on a large scale, to generate sustainable, alternative ways of building for the economic, ecological, and social challenges of increasing urban density. This applies both to historic quarters, which until now – despite being part of the local urban identity – were often demolished to make way for new buildings, as well as to the construction of New Towns, which have to establish new urban neighborhoods without benefitting from existing social networks
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The complexity of all these trends cannot be tackled alone with static solutions. A design approach that aims to constantly identify questions, opportunities, and challenges in a spirit of curiosity is far more contemporary and sustainable. To this end, this book serves as a resource for reviewing floor plan solutions that have already – as an adequate answer to specific challenges – been invented, built, and inhabited.
Originally published in: Oliver Heckmann, Friederike Schneider with Eric Zapel (eds.), Floor Plan Manual Housing, fifth revised and expanded edition, Birkhäuser, 2018.