design strategies for sustainable urban revitalization and local interventions as catalysts for social innovation are presented by the architecture firms LOHA in projects for Detroit and SHAU for Indonesian cities, with both employing integrative roles as designers, researchers, initiators of change, and moderators between numerous agencies. They consider architectural interventions as potential agencies to ‘design coexistence’ contributing to an open city. Based on community workshops and other participatory practices, their projects entail community framework plans, programming initiatives as well as small‐scale interventions, as community‐driven responses to imminent needs and initiatives.
Affordable housing policies are discussed by the sociologist Gerald Koessl from the Austrian Federation of Limited‐Profit Housing Associations, who considers the provision of affordable and secure homes as an important stepping stone to participate in social and economic life. He presents Vienna's limited‐profit housing developers as examples for market models, that are co‐shaped by social and institutional processes and that are sustainable also in the long term because of its revolving funds.
High‐Dense Typologies for Building Communities
With ongoing urban growth, the construction of new housing estates and buildings in either greenfield developments or within existing contexts will again be a ubiquitous response to provide shelter for growing urban populations, posing new challenges to the potential of habitats to cater to community building. In high‐dense contexts, building types emerge to be larger, higher, and more complex, and accommodate more residents than before, circumstances that will require new strategies to engender sense of belonging. With the impacts of dynamic societal diversification and global and local migration flows, though, the definitions, expectations, and commitments towards what community entails are increasingly diverse, dynamic, and conflicted. While a sensitive designing of the configuration, permeability, and programming of shared domains in habitats can overcome the often‐criticized anonymity in multistorey housing estates and encourage encounters across different social domains, purely spatial approaches often fail to influence how residents gather and liaise with each other and how equal access to shared domains can be secured. Whereas the benefits of integrative strategies for hard‐, org‐ and software also in the long term are increasingly discussed, the challenges to inclusive, open communities go beyond. Public debates might increasingly push for policies engendering socially mixed neighbourhoods, but the stigmatization of the alleged failure of public housing estates to engender sustainable communities, the privatization of social housing estates, and profit‐driven housing developments often lead to segregation along social classes. Gated communities emerge as emblematic practices for forms of ‘exclusive belonging’, while in particular vulnerable groups would depend even more on the informal support of communities. In view of growing segregation, which will necessitate even more integrative approaches to engender sense of belonging, normative, expert‐driven social engineering approaches employing housing to build a ‘new society’ (Klein 2012) no longer match the complex dynamics of urban societies. These necessitate discussions on how the ‘lived experiences’ of dwellers can be incorporated as criteria and expertise, and how the design and operation of habitats can enable co‐creation practices and communal engagements beyond the confines of the social enclaves of privileged groups, providing conditions and agencies to cater to inclusive and sustainable forms of belonging.
Three authors from socio‐spatial research on community building, public housing policies and architectural design profession from Singapore and an urban anthropologist from London discuss respective strategies for building communities.
Im Sik Cho, an architecture professor and researcher on urban community at National University Singapore shares collaborative research with sociologists and housing board experts on the impacts of built environments on community bonding. Integrated concepts for hard‐, org‐ and software and co‐creation strategies are introduced, which enhance social interaction in complex social and spatial contexts.
Jeremiah Lim, from the Housing & Development Board Singapore, explains how important community building and facilitating social bonding is for housing policies in a multiracial and multicultural city state with high levels of immigration. Strategies for commonality are shared, for high‐density developments with 50‐storey high‐rises, integrated public facilities, and spaces co‐created with communities.
The architect Siew Man Kok, MKPL Architects, shares about his firm's public housing projects in Singapore that adopt principles of integrated design typologies to optimize programmatic synergies within the development but also have an important role as urban connector. Diverse communal realms with different grades of publicity are integrated, catering to ageing in place and co‐locating facilities for different generations.
Saffron Woodcraft, an urban anthropologist from UCL London, criticizes normative ideals for urban communities, often embedded in planning policies, that at the same time engender segregation. Transdisciplinary knowledge co‐produced with dwellers is suggested to better capture their complex ‘lived experiences’ and forms of belonging. ‘Prosperity’ is proposed as a more sustainable metric for the qualities of shared conditions in urban habitats, covering both individual and collective socio‐economic inclusivity in communities.
Adaptive and Responsive Habitation
The urban societies of the future will face pressing societal shifts, with dynamically diversifying forms of cohabitation with less consistent life cycles than before, shrinking ratios of nuclear families, increasing incidents of singlehood or childless couples and growing demands by senior populations ageing in place. In particular, the emerging care‐gaps are tendencies, to which urban habitats should be able to react with both their spatial configurations and their operations. Rising income inequalities and gentrification processes in urban neighbourhoods affect even middle‐class families, which necessitate new approaches for affordable housing. For particular generational groups like the millennials, the high housing costs can have grave implications for everything from social cohesion to family formation, forcing them to postpone ‘basic stages of adulthood’ (Barr and Malik 2016). Also changing work‐life balances are shifts that future habitats would have to accommodate, noting that these also coincide increasingly with significant increases of sometimes involuntary self‐employment connected often with low and unstable incomes (OECD 2019b), again necessitating affordable, flexible habitats.
These aspects challenge the adequacy of housing stocks, and the design of habitats will increasingly necessitate complementary strategies that reach beyond the pure facilitation of housing as shelter. The challenges are reflected in increasing debates about ‘Caring City’ and the ‘relational dimensions’ of habitats. They coincide – and correlate – with new attitudes and practices of sharing, regarding caregiving, working, serving and other practices. New cultures of living together in collaborative habitats have emerged that will as well affect urban habitation as such. In view of these tendencies adaptive and responsive habitats are considered necessary. Adaptability is seen as spatial capability to accommodate diverse forms of cohabitation and other appropriations, by spatial and programmatic diversity or flexibility. ‘Responsiveness’ – enabled by adaptability – empowers agencies and strategies for informal and formal practices within these habitats, to engender inclusive forms of coexistence and care.
As active contributors to these debates, two practising architects, two design researchers and experts on integrated health policies offer diverse perspectives how innovative concepts for built environments can with both their adaptability and their responsive operation cater to significant societal and demographic shifts and the diversifying needs and agencies of tenants during both the launch‐ and service lifetime of buildings.
Gérald Ledent, architecture professor at UC Louvain, questions how to design for a more diverse society with growing numbers of individuals being left behind and how to create new solidarities through housing. Several design strategies and respective
