al. 2017) are manifold, can be either legislative, financial, or project‐based, bottom‐up or top‐down – and might often emerge across different fields, parties, and strategies. The actors are both spatial and social designers, administrative bodies, legislators, NGOs, or community initiatives. The contexts of intervention are simultaneously legal, spatial, and social and affect both the design and operation of habitats.
One aspect often raised is the control of property prices or their entire withdrawal from unrestrained market mechanisms – an important prerequisite to prevent gentrification and displacement. There is an increasing recognition that profit maximization in an essential good like housing is problematic and that non‐profit economic models are more sustainable in the long term. Examples are the Limited‐Profit‐Housing Act applied in Vienna and Austria in general, to provide habitats whose economic viability is not based on short‐term profit‐maximization but on creating habitats that are sustainable, both socially and ecologically, in the long term (see Gerald Kössl’s chapter). To restrain property speculation, since 2016 public land in Berlin is only awarded as leasehold, (Weißmüller 2018). In Zurich, a referendum decided in 2011 that by 2050 one third of the city's total rental stock should be affordable, non‐profit apartments, so that by now 27% of rental apartments operate on a non‐profit basis, with 20% run by cooperatives (Kalagas 2019). Other models secure affordable apartments ownership by lease‐to‐own financing policies to support social sustainability and stable communities, such as with the Puukuokka Housing project in Finland (Hamm 2015). Here, a small down payment on the purchase price entitles dwellers to a state‐guaranteed loan.
In Singapore, 80% of the permanent population live in subsidized apartments built by the public Housing & Development Board, almost all of them as owner‐occupiers (The Economist 2017), while speculative spikes in property prices are in general limited by taxation policies (Deng et al. 2019). Also, in the Canadian province British Columbia, a Speculation and Vacancy Tax (Government of British Columbia 2020) penalizes property acquisitions purely based on asset building. But while Inclusionary Zoning legislations in New York also claim to prevent segregation, Madden and Marcuse (2016) criticize these policies for leaving the provision of affordable housing entirely to the market and having significant loopholes: mandatory affordable housing units are not only reverted to market prices after a specified period, they can also be built in completely different areas and thus rather enhance gentrification (Madden and Marcuse 2016).
As an alternative track, participatory and bottom‐up‐initiated collective building and living models are widely discussed as solutions for the scarcity of affordable housing option and the empowerment of dwellers that conventional housing developments are unable to resolve (Kries 2017). Building cooperatives are considered to be socially sustainable, inclusive solutions to address global housing challenges (Lutz 2019). But those collaborative housing projects based on individual (home) ownership can still have ‘a tendency to further the economic interests of residents, at the expense of the external solidarity with groups looking to access affordable housing’ (Sørvoll, Bengtsson, 2018), bearing the risk ‘that co‐housing communities will become (if not remain) enclaves for the relatively privileged.’ (Larsen 2020). As a consequence, Madden and Marcuse (2016) argue that alternative forms of tenure must be implemented and also be pursued by public housing authorities at a larger scale and made accessible to marginalized groups, in order to be more than ‘being interesting exceptions to an otherwise unchanged residential condition’.
Designing Coexistence
However, alternative, emancipatory housing projects at local scale can also serve as ‘living demonstrations’ of potential habitats for inclusive cities, as examples of how ‘housing might support non‐oppressive social relations (…) in everyday life’ (Madden and Marcuse 2016).
In the US, there are currently about 243 community land trusts, nonprofit organization originating from the civil right movements, that acquire land to be used for the benefit of the neighbourhood like for food production or affordable housing. As a response to the housing crisis they lease homeownership to tenants at an affordable and long‐term secured rate (Semuels 2015).
Exemplary projects like the cooperative La Borda in Barcelona (see chapter by Parameswaran et al., and Cabré and Andrés 2018) that emerged from existing neighbourhood networks are run as cooperative ownerships that grant its tenants the right to use a dwelling, with particular concerns for affordable housing needs. Incorporating concepts for local economies both to both create revenue and nurture liveability in the neighbourhood and being participatorily designed, managed, and partly incrementally built with the support of social and spatial design experts, the project aligns with the concept of ‘Designing Coexistence’ (Rieniets et al. 2009) that was touched on above.
With this as an agenda, the curators of the ‘Open City – Designing Coexistence’ Biennale in Rotterdam (Rieniets et al. 2009) define a design culture that emphasizes the immersion of policymakers, activists, and designers into vulnerable contexts and the mapping of its socio‐economic conditions, resilience, and social capital as an important prerequisite for sustainable inclusivity‐minded interventions. The necessity to support such contexts in this way applies in particular for urban neighbourhoods in which the consequences of social disadvantage, demographic shifts, and global immigration are concentrated (Potz and Thies 2010), a central issue that can only be tackled with the provision of integration services and the participation of civil society (Potz and Thies 2010). Working on the ground with often participatory projects proposes design strategies as ‘catalysts’ and ‘animation of change’ to ‘facilitate more equitable and sustainable futures’ (Rieniets et al. 2009). ‘Designing coexistence’ combines social design and architectural design practice and pursues inclusive diversity rather as a win‐win scenario, by building upon existing social capital, by enabling communities, and by facilitating interaction and collaboration across different groups and interests. Putnam (1993) defines the benefits of such social capital – a network of relations between people jointly living in a particular socio‐spatial entity, allowing them to function effectively and for their mutual benefit. It enables cooperation, civic engagement, and collective wellbeing, based on norms of reciprocity and mutual trust.
A few, deliberately diverse references for such practices of inclusion, enabling, and empowering shall be briefly mentioned to illustrate the bandwidth of an inclusive urbanism.
‘Naturally Occurring Retirement Community’ (NORC) are bottom‐up organized senior communities that have organically evolved in New York, led by senior citizens preferring to age in place. Their proactive initiatives have been combined with public policies and made eligible for social services like home health care, transportation, education, and entertainment (Black et al. 2004).
The Caño Martín Peña community, an informal settlement along a canal in Puerto Rico's capital San Juan is a self‐initiated development and land‐use plan to relocate homes away from increasing flood hazards and pollution and improve their living conditions. Co‐developing the comprehensive plan through a sustained participatory engagement process, the dwellers also claimed for and established a Community Land Trust to avoid the gentrification and displacement often arising with such neighbourhood improvements. The land has been transferred by the government to sustain an inclusive community of about 2000 families, which now collectively owns and manages its own settlement (Stanchich 2017; Yarina et al. 2019).
For the inclusion of the youngest, Francesco Tonucci developed the concepts for ‘La città dei bambini’ (The City of Children), implemented by more than 200 communities worldwide (Alonso 2019). Rooted in the UN Children Rights Convention, it proclaimed the idea of children as citizens with a voice in decisions affecting their environs, to revise exclusionary decision‐making cultures for the making of cities that mainly had ‘the adult, male, worker in mind’.
The project ‘Who Cares?’ (see chapter by Parameswaran et al.), developed by the social design studio CareLab in collaboration with the Pumpkin Lab of the National Council
