home by empowering relatives and transforming the caregiver experience in Singapore (PDA, President's Design Award Singapore 2018 2018) – a city with a rapidly ageing population and a social care system significantly relying on family support. Ethnographic research and social and spatial design strategies were combined with co‐creation workshops to re‐design the caregiving system and experiences, aiming to empower caregivers with a wide‐ranging set of services, tools, spaces, policies, programmes, and campaigns.
While these examples focus on enabling the inclusion of different groups with entire neighbourhoods in mind, I refer to three projects specifically aiming for inclusive housing (Heckmann 2017). Beyond giving a shelter to vulnerable populations, they again draw connections to the crucial aspects of empowerment, local integration and stabilizing of local economies: to provide housing for the 2011 Tsunami victims in Japan, Kunihiro Ando and Satoyama Architecture Laboratory designed timber houses following traditional techniques, with the intent of both reviving the local timber industry and boosting community spirit in Iwaki. Local carpenters taught residents how to incrementally build with wood and then make furniture from leftover materials, to strengthen bonds within the community and to enhance the emotional connections with one's shelter. Star Apartments, built in 2014 by Michael Maltzan Architects for homeless people in Los Angeles, had beyond the provision of shelter the aim to socially integrate the housing community into its neighbourhood – by co‐locating social interfaces also used by neighbours in the lower levels, like a medical clinic, a community wellness centre, and offices for health services and housing supply. Quinta Monroy, designed 2004 by Elemental in Iquique, Chile, is an often‐discussed affordable housing project. The aim was to sustain an informal community by legalizing and nurturing its vital economic and social networks – in lieu of often pursued evictions and enforced resettlements of entire neighbourhoods into places without any infrastructure. Houses with voids for future expansion were built to keep the initial price as affordable as possible and within the range of public subsidy policies, and to enable incremental additions needed for changing demands.
Also in other contexts, inclusion‐minded engagements for housing projects aim to avoid the often predominant segregation of vulnerable population in specialized settings: In Munich, the ‘Club for Disabled People and their Friends’ (CBF), proactively initiated the cohousing project ‘Johann‐Fichte‐Straße’ (Förster et al. 2020) under the umbrella of a cooperative housing association, to jointly organize an architecture competition and build an inclusive habitat for tenants with and without disabilities, in which the dweller's participation during both the design and construction process also helped to build a joint identity. An association of single people and single parents eligible for subsidized housing, an agency assisting with dementia cohousing, and dwellers seeking self‐occupied property liaised with each other to built ‘Sonnenhof’ (Förster et al. 2020), an inclusive, multigenerational housing community in Freiburg, Germany – with the advice of ‘Mietshäuser Syndikat’, which supports self‐organized, non‐profit housing projects.
Such examples cover a broad set of actors, initiatives, and strategies and illustrate the bandwidth of inclusion‐minded projects in contexts with vulnerable populations. They involve diverse stakeholders, a shift between top‐down and bottom‐up approaches, and combine spatial and social design instruments to pursue both social and economic sustainability as essential prerequisites for inclusivity. They consider communities as proactive agents, enable co‐presences and participation, and empower citizens to engage. With all these, it is important to consider the state of exclusion as a volatile condition that might not only affect those defined upfront to be vulnerable. Political, economic, and social conditions can easily shift and also threaten those with exclusion that considered themselves as integrated parts of urban societies. Consequently, agencies of engagement and inclusion have to be responsive and agile enough to react.
Six chapters – two by designers working in vulnerable and fragile urban contexts in Detroit and Indonesia, one by a research lab investigating urban communities, two by sociologists conducting research on affordable housing in Vienna and on the inclusivity of social networks in Singapore, and one by representatives of inclusive municipal policies in Barcelona – are included in this chapter to share their perspectives on inclusive urbanism. I'd like to thank Vincent Chua, Florian Heinzelmann and Daliana Suryawinata, Ian Dickenson, and Gerald Kössl for their feedback while working on this chapter.
Lluís Torrens, Sebastià Riutort, and Marta Juan from Barcelona City Council and the Barcelona Institute of Regional and Metropolitan Studies write on how the city of Barcelona is currently dealing with the redesign of services for people considering the interaction between the physical and social aspects. Innovative practices in the field of the care of elderly people and the creation of solidarity ties are explained as examples that help the city to move towards a new social city model, based on a territorial and community approach. This would crystallize into what they call ‘integral superblocks’, small territorial units whereby to better organize the response to population needs and societal challenges.
Vincent Chua, a sociologist at the Department of Sociology of National University Singapore, writes about cities as places of great social diversity characterized by the coexistence of different groups who do not always mingle with each other. He writes about the emergence of a class divide in Singapore in terms of the network segregation that has occurred along the lines of education and housing. He proposes three ways to create an inclusive society. First, the establishment of common frames of reference that unite diverse groups. Second, the promotion of voluntary associational life to enhance social capital. And third, the active building of personal communities based on the principles of diversity that foster, at the collective level, a greater sense of belonging.
Chong Keng Hua, Ha Tshui Mum and To Kien from the Social Urban Research Groupe at Singapore University of Technology & Design (SUTD) and Yuen Chau, SUTD, share about how an inclusive smart community can be achieved through two strategies: social integration and enabling community. The former prioritizes and offers place‐making and place‐keeping opportunities to the marginalized groups, thereby improving wellbeing for all; the latter blends Big Data and Thick Data into the generative co‐creating process, and through online‐offline engagement platforms encourages self‐initiation by the community themselves. They envision that such ‘Community Enabling Framework’ could bring about cohesiveness amidst diversity, and social resilience in time of crisis.
Ian Dickenson, Principal at Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects [LOHA] in Los Angeles, recounts insights gleaned during ongoing community‐led design work the firm has been engaged with in Detroit – a post‐industrial city significantly affected by systemic changes in global production, by subsequent depopulation, disinvestment, and policies that marginalized vast portions of the population. Ranging from large community framework plans to stand‐alone structures the firm has been engaged in, LOHA present contextually driven responses at a variety of scales. The author advocates the importance of collective mentality, active participation, and sharing of environments – as joint resource and responsibility to actively define and maintain both as physical and ideological space. Based on conclusions from community workshops, focus group meetings, and feedback sessions, design strategies, programming initiatives, and policy recommendations were developed to nurture an inclusive revitalization of exemplary urban neighbourhoods that could as well set an example for growing cities.
Florian Heinzelmann and Daliana Suryawinata from SHAU Architects share about their design agenda for Indonesian cities. They consider architecture as an impactful agency to enable urban reciprocal practices, forms, and processes as important elements contributing to an open city. They share about a number of projects, ranging from public spaces to empower local communities, micro‐libraries to respond to high illiteracy rates but to also accommodate multiple other community‐driven activities, and in parts participatory housing projects embracing the informal kampong spirit for vertical, multiprogrammatic communalities.
Gerald Kössl, a sociologist and housing researcher at the Austrian Federation of Limited‐Profit Housing Associations, discusses the role and our understanding of markets in the context of housing
