Throughout the course of the graduation the student developed a mixed-use building complex for the Hawkers Market site in the city center of Sylhet, Bangladesh. Working within the scope of the Global Housing studio, the focus was set on creating a building composed primarily of dwellings that works in the challenging climate and socio-economic context of the location. Within this scope special emphasis was laid on researching and designing the implementation of the architectural concept of “incremental housing” within a high-rise structure.

The results of the research into similar projects and relevant case studies informed the design. This design integrates a conventional “ready-built” portion, catering to middle- to high-income residents, with a more unconventional open-volume section designed for lower-income residents. The latter consists of completely empty duplex units stacked vertically, forming a series of unoccupied building plots in the sky. The innovation lies in how the two parts of the building are interconnected, benefiting one another while maintaining completely segregated circulation paths for different user groups.

Social housing stock, homelessness and poverty is a comparative study, investigating the effects of the spatial distribution of these three subjects on one another and their relations for the two case study cities of Amsterdam and The Hague.

Several studies show that social housing has its implications on homelessness and poverty, bettering the situation once social housing programs are set in place (Jacobs, 2019; O’Donnel, 2021; Whyte & Hawkey & Smith, 2023). This study sought to fill the knowledge gap on the effects of the spatial distribution of social housing on homelessness and poverty by means of literature reviews and spatial analysis.

The results show that areas with higher concentration of social housing more often have higher concentrations of poverty, while at the same time the presence of social housing itself has beneficial effects on tackling poverty and homelessness. Thus lowering poverty and homelessness in areas with concentrations of social housing relative to areas without these.
When analyzing the two case studies, the results show evidence for a correlation between the spatial distribution of social housing and the spatial distribution of poverty for the majority of neighborhoods in the two cities. Research into the spatial distribution of homelessness for the case studies lacked the sources needed for getting to results.