A VALUE-BASED DEVELOPMENT OF DENMARK’S PUBLIC HOUSING

PhD project by Sidse Martens Gudmand-Høyer

The current need for renovation of the Danish public housing stock is massive while there is growing attention to the buildings as architectural heritage. However, what is the prospects and challenges pertaining to current aims of renovating Danish public housing initially constructed in the period 1910–1974, while preserving the buildings as architectural heritage – value-based development.

Offsetting in current practice, the Ph.D.-project investigates the consequences, compromises and conflicts in relation to the ambition of value-based development in current public housing renovation projects. What are the various norms for preservation and transformation characterising the complex heritage field, how are preservation and heritage conceived from an architecturally acknowledged point of view, in official practices and recommendations and how are such understandings currently criticised? What happens when these understandings are introduced in the Danish public housing context and must be dealt with within the specific legal and administrative framework? To answer such questions, it is essential to survey how public housing has come to be conceived as architectural heritage during the last decade.

Based on such inquiries the empirically based analyses concerns firstly how the valued public housing architectural heritage is conveyed through the new physical solutions with regard to questions of contemporary authenticity. Secondly, the ways in which practical solutions are negotiated among different stakeholders. Thirdly, the most significant challenges that occur when trying to develop public housing with reference to values of architectural heritage have been identified and related to official project and funding processes.