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The Future of Social Housing
Mission
Mission
Common Ground is a research-based studio for architectural design and planning students.
The goal is to propose new models of social housing that are expressive of
the cultural and societal systems in which they are embedded.
The studio is conducted as a global inquiry of social housing arrangements.
Over the course of three years, the studio will focus on three North-American cities:
Mexico City, Los Angeles, and Phoenix.
Three Years, Three Cities
Three Years, Three Cities
What is Social Housing?
What is Social Housing?
Goals and Definition
Goals and Definition
In this studio, we define social housing as the act of shaping durable, adequate, accessible, affordable, and contextually-relevant housing solutions for all. The normative goal of social housing is twofold.
First, we contend that all individuals should have access to the private space they need to rest and reset, so that they can thrive in the city, live the life to which they aspire, regardless of their financial means, gender, education, race and ethnicity, place of origin. Second, social housing should promote the harmonious co-existence of diverse communities, in tune with their cultural, ecological, and environmental context.
Social housing is thus conceived as a housing-first strategy that fosters equal access to opportunities for individuals; and socially and environmentally sustainable living arrangements for communities.
The Need for a Common Ground
The Need for a Common Ground
To achieve these goals, we argue that social housing requires a common ground between the public-, private sector, and the communities they serve; and also between architects, urban designers, and planners. Social housing is neither fully public nor necessarily privatized. It can go either way or it can be both at once. Social housing projects are not necessarily big. There is no one-size-fits-all social housing solution. The definition of social housing cannot be limited to the design of the buildings, the people who live in them, the money they pay for rent, or the policies that set standards for the above.
The Need for a New Approach
The Need for a New Approach
Our proposed definition is an attempt to transcend existing models by focusing on the goals of social housing. There is no agreed-upon pre-existing definition of "social housing." For example, in European welfare states, the phrase typically refers to housing provided by the government to meet the needs of low-income populations. Such a model is commonly referred to as "public housing" in the United States, Mexico, and other neoliberal economies where market forces predominantly determine housing production and prices. In Singapore, the vast majority of the housing stock has been developed by the public sector, for the poor and the rich alike. The Singaporean "model" works in its context, a young country the size of a city with a unique economic system called state capitalism; it is not easily replicable.
Guiding Principles
Guiding Principles
A few principles guide this studio in an effort to shape the future of social housing. This studio is research-based. It adopts a comparative perspective. It brings together multiple voices and perspectives on the issue at hand. It encourages different means of expression to propose innovative solutions.
Research-based social housing solutions are most effective; they are grounded in first-hand knowledge of the local context and therefore context-specific;
A comparative perspective enables to examine the mechanisms that articulate the different components of social housing models in different contexts;
Multiple voices and perspectives enrich how we see, understand, and think about social housing.
Different means of expression are needed to achieve innovation in social housing, using the language of the different disciplines and stakeholders represented.
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