Architecture and Safety: Safe social housing for the inhabitants of the periphery of São Paulo

In São Paulo, Brazil, the urbanization of workers without education or a steady income has caused a large demand for social housing, with 800,000 families forced to live in settlements and slums without a legal basis. At the same time, the crime rates of the past decades brought forth a standard of ‘enclavement’ of urban blocks, with fences...

Second Chances: Dwellings: Social and Material Reintegration

How can collective housing design encourage social inclusion? From an ecological perspective, the housing of socially disadvantaged and transformation of post-war mass housing is explored. Socially disadvantaged people such as the formerly homeless have often difficulties integrating into a new living environment and need a more stable...

Starters in the city: a lively and vibrant live-work environment in the future metropolitan area of Rotterdam

There is an urgent need for affordable housing solutions in the Netherlands before 2030. However, the focus should not only be on producing new dwellings, but rather on creating homes and neighbourhoods that meet the needs of the future population. In Dutch cities there is a change in the residential culture and there is a large lack of...

Redefining the Hong Kong Typology

Hong Kong for me is a fascinating city; it embodies many contradictory conditions while at the same time acts as a palimpsest -- a readable, but layered, whole. The city exists as a lamination of eastern and western forces that can be seen in both the social and built environment of the city. As the city has grown and become wealthier, these...

Converting office space: Using modular prefab architecture to convert vacant office buildings.

Almost 7 million square meters of office space in The Netherlands is vacant today. Conversion into housing is an often named solution, but is hardly ever put into practice because of financial and technical difficulties (location aspects not taken into account). On the other hand, standardization in office design can be seen as an opportunity in...

From Emptiness to Japanese Space: Designing from a Japanese Perspective

The research on space in Japanese architecture resulted in a number of spatial characteristics. These were then used as starting points for the design of a housing block in Dutch context.