An Alternative Mode of Development

Abstract

Project description: Living conditions and qualities have become some of the most important and long-standing social and economic issues in cities since the Industrial Revolution. More and more people have been going to cities to look for jobs, capital and different ways of life. Amsterdam is one of these destinations. Housings in the Netherlands were regulated and planned by the state in the first half of the 20th Century. Yet, since the 1980s, a lot of housing associations in the Netherlands which provide social rental housings have been privatized. The government also started promoting home ownership. Under the influence of Neoliberalism, free market was embraced and adopted to developed the economy. The relationship between housings and capital were interwoven and highly dependent on each other. More and more houses have been built and sold by private developers. However, they are mainly developing the housings for profits, not for the social life of the people and the neighbourhoods. A mismatch between the demand and supply of housings has then emerged, especially for the low-income groups with less capital. After the 2007 global financial crisis, the problems of housings were aggravated. The government no longer has capital to build social housings while there is an insufficient supply of housings of which the types are not provided by private developers either. This project tries to deal with the above mentioned issues with various strategies realized in a masterplan in the Amsterdam North. It is a masterplan providing affordable housings for people to rent and purchase, and at the same time generate capital for the housing associations for the maintenance of the old social housings and future development. The hierarchy of networks, programmes and density of the site context were taken into consideration for the implementation of the project. Mixed programmes of residential, public and commerical uses are employed to enhance the social life in the neighbourhoods. A higher density is proposed to meet the critical mass of having local scale businesses. The housing units are configured so that they are either facing south-east and north-west, with the afternoon sunlight and the winter monsoon coming mainly from south-west. On a building level, double-storey flats are provided with low-cost construction. The ground floor is elevated to provide a shaded semi-open space for people to rest and stay during harsh weather. This space is linked to the atrium where cross ventilation is possible for the flats. Split floors are used to foster the physical communication of residents living on different floors. The roof of the building is allocated to the short-stay housing, for students and artists, built with light weight construction. The roof is stepping down as a gesture to make relation to the activities on the ground.