FLEXIBLE COMMUNITIES

Residents in Danish public housing areas are increasingly playing a more active role in realising a range of welfare tasks aimed at ensuring social well-being and the green transition in our urban areas. This imposes new demands on the local communities in the residential areas and on the built environments around these areas.

The research and dissemination project Flexible Communities uncovers and examines challenges and opportunities relating to this issue.

The National Museum of Denmark and Aarhus School of Architecture are behind the project, which is financially supported by The National Building Foundation and the philanthropic association Realdania.

Today, public housing areas face new challenges as well as expectations to maintain and strengthen social and environmental sustainability. Welfare tasks previously managed or carried out by the public sector increasingly involve local communities through decentralised planning, local co-creation, decentralisation and volunteer work.

This, for instance, applies to new housing offers, where residents are expected to be part of communities that are more committed to providing care than was previously the case. Generationernes Hus (house of generations), in Aarhus, is one example of a housing and welfare project where the architecture aims to support communities across different life situations.

These changes require rethinking. Not just a rethinking of the welfare model that created a Danish society characterised by strong cohesion. But just as much a rethinking of the social, architectural and technological resources we need to solve the most important challenges in terms of social well-being and the green transition in public housing areas.

The research and dissemination project Flexible Communities is going to provide new knowledge about the frameworks for socially sustainable mixed cities and good housing environments. The aim is that the research project should actively contribute to elucidating robust and lasting urban and social developments in Denmark.

Haunstrupgaard_-Sidse-Martens-Gudmand-Høyer

Højstrupgaard_-Sidse-Martens-Gudmand_Høyer

The research of the project will create new insights into the interaction between informal communities and built environments in public housing areas.

It will also point to new, specific directions for future urban development that support the broader political and economic agenda on social well-being and the green transition in our towns. Specifically, the researchers are going to look into (1) the historical emergence of ‘the Danish model’ of social housing; (2) the interaction between informal communities and built environments in three chosen residential areas, resulting in (3) the development of social housing prototypes that express tomorrow’s sustainable urban development.

The results of the project will be disseminated through research publications, on a virtual platform, during debate evenings, and through the exhibition activities of the National Museum of Denmark.

The project introduces an approach to sustainable urban development that focuses on ‘social urban models’ that can be seen as effective ways of organising urban areas – in social and physical terms. This is often overlooked, as they are not necessarily coordinated by any body or any organisation. They, nevertheless, have remarkable resources that can be taken out of their local contexts to provide the foundation for developing general models for the sustainable cities of the future. This approach requires an innovative cross-disciplinary approach, which is why all the field work is carried out in cross-disciplinary teams of researchers with a background in anthropology, history and architecture.

The research project is connected to Research Lab 2.

CONTACT

Anne Corlin

Assistant Professor, Cand.arch.,PhD

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