This article was originally published on Common Edge.
If you follow housing policy in America, you may have noticed a particular term cropping up a lot recently: social housing. Maybe you’ve read a longform academic article, live in a city that is codifying a social-housing policy like Seattle or Atlanta, or seen one of the recent mentions in The New York Times, highlighting U.S. and Viennese success stories. On the design front, Dezeen is running a social-housing revival series.
Contemporary cityscapes vary greatly from their early precedents, hosting urban life in sprawling interior spaces like mega-hotels, shopping malls, and transportation hubs. Soaring atriums and expansive concourses are now a normal part of the urban experience, allowing for public activity 'inside' the city. Interiors and urbanism are often considered at far ends of the spatial spectrum, with architecture serving as a mediator between the two. The growing significance of 'interior urbanism' in the functioning of the built environment demands the question - how can cities be reinvented from the inside out?
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen inequalities laid bare, especially when it pertains to the unequal allotment of architectural resources to people. The start of the pandemic saw Europeans who could afford it, for example, leaving the urban metropolises they lived in and going away to their second homes in the countryside. We’ve also seen how poorer people in places like New York, for example, do not have adequate access to green spaces – a critical part of human well-being. Within this conversation is also the issue of social housing - known by multiple names around the world - and how the social housing that gets designed in the present and in the future should respond to ever-changing global needs.
“Our fellows have shown courage, written books, founded mission-driven non-profits, created new coalitions, and disseminated new tools,” said Cindy Sanders, FASLA, CEO of OLIN, in her introduction of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership program at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.
Sanders highlighted the results of a five-year assessment of the LAF fellowship program and its efforts to grow the next generation of diverse landscape architecture leaders. The assessment shows that past fellows are shaping the future of the built environment in key public, non-profit, and private sector roles.
With many high streets hollowing out and the National Health Services Association pushed to its limits, Heatherwick Studio is calling for a new kind of health space in metropolitan cities. The Health Street initiative is placed right at the heart of urban communities, reimagining the way we look at well-being and the holistic health of complete localities. Moreover, this radical approach to health creation is based on integrating community-led facilities into the local high streets.
It is a great privilege to amplify the voice of architects and other built environment professionals. It is also an enormous challenge as it requires a lot of investigation and time from our content team. However, the effort is gratifying. It puts us in contact with some of the most prominent talents in our field who have been discussing subjects such as cities, metaverse, community, environment, democracy, sustainability, building technology and interiors, to mention just a few.
The end of the summer season is usually marked by crowds rushing to public pools to enjoy their final days splashing around the water. Public pools are much more complex than the fenced-in, chlorinated, and noisy bodies of water that they may seem to be. A delicate history and many socio-economic influences lie beneath the surface and dictate who gets to go for a swim. What happens when pools shift towards becoming private property and a sort of status symbol, and when these public spaces aren’t intended for everyone?
If you’re reading this right now, or have read an article on ArchDaily, it’s because you were in a place that enabled you to connect to the internet. Think about a time when you found yourself in a dead zone, where the internet was lagging and you were unable to connect your computer to WiFi to finish an assignment or even without the ability to connect your phone to quickly Google something. You likely dashed to the nearest coffee shop, or place where WiFi was more reliable, just to have the feeling of being online again. The internet, in an ideal world, is equally open to all providing access to knowledge and the ability to easily connect with others. But what happens when you don’t have internet? How is your life impacted if you’re on the wrong side of the digital divide and live in an area without broadband access?
Design Justice is a branch of architecture and design focused on redesigning cities, products, services and environments with historic reparations in mind.
The term emerged about 7 years ago when debates and dialogues about inclusion and diversity in spaces started to get stronger, creating movements that fought for the rights of people who had their roots and choices denied in society.
Ethical practice spans all parts of architecture. From intersectionality and labor to the climate crisis, a designer must work with a range of conditions and contexts that inform the built environment and the process of its creation. Across cultures, policies and climates, architecture is as much functional and aesthetic as it is political, social, economic, and ecological. By addressing the ethics of practice, designers can reimagine the discipline's impact and who it serves.
The definition of equity in dictionaries is the quality of giving equal treatment to everyone while still acknowledging the differences between individuals. In this sense, equity means fairness in the way we act toward each person but keeping in mind his or her specific characteristics and needs. From a medical perspective, equity implies that everyone needs care and attention but not necessarily the same. It is also worth mentioning that the terms equity and equality are often used interchangeably but they mean different things, mainly because equality is based on the principle of universal rights, in which all individuals are subject to the same rules, without exception.
María Cristina Cravino, the head of numerous research projects and publications on informal settlements and the politics of public habitation, draws from her background in anthropology to become one of the most prominent voices in the discussion about rights to the city and modern urban conflicts.
To get her perspective, we sat down with Cravino to discuss her observations and understanding of the issue--especially in the context of quarantine and lockdowns--as well as her reflections on the role of academia in exploring the problem and finding solutions.
Celebrated on the first Monday of every October, World Architecture Day was set up by the Union International des Architects (UIA) back in 2005 to “remind the world of its collective responsibility for the future of the human habitat”, coinciding with UN-Habitat's World Habitat Day.
This year both organizations have defined themes related to improving the quality of life and reducing the effects of the climate crisis by taking action in the built environment. While the International Union of Architects' 2021 World Architecture Day theme is "Clean Environment for a Healthy World", UN-Habitat's World Habitat Day has announced "Accelerating Urban Action for a Carbon-Free World" as their topic.
The impact that the climate crisis has had on the globe over the last decade is a critical influence on how architects and urban planners design future cities. It’s clear that both at an individual and corporate level, it’s important to take action and protect the earth before the negative impacts change our familiar environments forever- and time is running out fast. When it comes to creating ways to save our cities from “the next big one”, whether it be a hurricane, flood, snowstorm, or fire, the way that we design the preventative infrastructure neglects a significant number of people. Climate change doesn’t just impact the wealthiest places in the world, it actually has greater effects on the most impoverished.
Cities we live in today have been built on principles designed decades ago, with prospects of ensuring that they are habitable by everyone. Throughout history, cities have been catalysts of economic growth, serving as focal points for businesses and migration. However, in the last decade, particularly during the last couple of years, the world has witnessed drastic reconfigurations in the way societies work, live, and commute.
Today’s urban fabric highlights two demographic patterns: rapid urbanization and large youth populations. Cities, although growing in scale, have in fact become younger, with nearly four billion of the world’s population under the age of 30 living in urban areas, and by 2030, UN-Habitat expects 60% of urban populations to be under the age of 18. So when it comes to urban planning and the future of cities, it is evident that the youth should be part of the conversation.
One of the big economic factors of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the issue of tenant evictions and rent moratoriums. As millions of people quickly lost their jobs, it meant that they began to struggle to pay their rents. Now, as the economy slowly begins to recover and some return to work, there’s been pushback on the moratoriums, with landlords and tenants being split on how to move forward with the future payments. Tenants still can’t pay their rent and landlords themselves are burdened by the lack of income. But what this tug of war really sheds light on is how out of reach the costs of living have become in some of the densest cities, and how housing in some ways has been seen as an amenity, not a necessity or a basic right- even in a global pandemic.
In the world of design and urban planning, aesthetics and functionality seem to take the spotlight, especially in how large-scale housing projects are developed. While this can be a good thing that continuously pushes the modern boundary of what we consider to be a dwelling, in some aspects, it has shined a negative light on how we perceive and stigmatize “bad design” in public and affordable housing, the socioeconomic factors that have created the need for it, and the types of residents who benefit most from these types of housing policies.
Around the world, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fact that some of the poorest people were hit the hardest by not only the impacts the virus had on public health but also the social and economic shockwaves that came as a result. And now, as we emerge on the other side yet also enter the second wave of restrictions around the globe, urban planners and government officials are beginning to realize that the pandemic has pulled back the curtains on another inequitable feature of cities- the proximity to public parks and spaces.
