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Urban biography about the past and future of a deprived residential neighbourhood typology, featuring the cases of Rotterdam and Minsk
N.D. Chabayeuski (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
E.M. Bet – Mentor (TU Delft - Urban Design)
Ana Petrovic – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Urban Studies)
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Abstract
With the progressing housing shortage, there is a need for affordable and accessible housing to accommodate the vulnerable population whose number steadily increases every year. Post-socialist urban residential neighbourhoods, an outdated and neglected but culturally and sentimentally significant typology, has the potential to become a solution for this. If regenerated in a considerate way, those have the potential to become not only areas offering affordable housing and comfortable living conditions for the vulnerable population, but places which feel like home and provide the support to help the residents become less vulnerable and grow further socially and financially. Informed urban regeneration of the public spaces of post-socialist urban residential neighbourhoods with focus on the accumulation of social capital would accommodate the need for both housing and community, while helping the neglected typology become a place that truly feels like home and a place to belong. Essentially, the goal of the project is to argue that having a home is not only about ownership, because the notion of “home” goes beyond that: home is also our social capital, and the possibility to create or maintain social capital needs to be facilitated accordingly in urban residential neighbourhoods.