M a s s H o u s i n g a n d S u s t a i n a b i l i t y
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A city should never be satisfied with a high cost policy alone. A city that wants to remain
a good city must try to strike a balance between housing the masses in an affordable
way while offering outdoor qualities to all. This is the balance Selvaag tried to fight since
The Second World War. This is the fight that all urbanists tentatively would be expected
to be participating in.
There are many architectural contributions resulting from having faced this challenge up-
front. There are also academic institutions realising that there are shrinking cities and
growing cities. There are relatively new towns and older existing towns that stand still
and hardly change. There are shrinking cities. They all call for different approaches as
they contain different inherent challenges. It is clear that we cannot all live in garden
cities (HOWARD 1945). The challenge facing growing cities is that of how to densify
while ensuring a high quality environment. Many planners and architects offer high-
quality prototype designs for such densification projects. The recent literature is
reflecting this (SCOTT 2012:237-256). It is crucial that more contribute to this ongoing
discussion in order to establish a better overall understanding of the challenge at hand.
The UN Year of Shelter for the Homeless case 1987
The UN declared 1987 the International Year of Shelter for the Homeless
.
The
homelessness drama was to be highlighted and solutions to solve it welcomed. Among
the tools applied were an international architectural design competition that invited
architects all over the world to propose solutions based on a global generic idea or a
local site specific one. The competition focused on new technologies for social housing
in developing and developed countries. Many focused on the environmental side of the
challenge and searched for untraditional solutions to the housing problem with energy
challenges at the core (RØSTVIK 1992, 128-129).
The UN year revealed that there is a growing need for addressing the issue of
homelessness and there are a lot of good ideas among designers as to how this can be
done. The challenge was and still is, how to design and build affordable mass housing
with low running costs, while maintaining a high level as regards sustainability. Some
projects clearly identified the main content to be a wider sustainability concept that
needs to be addressed when dealing with homelessness – especially in low cost
developing countries with limited monetary resources but blessed with abundant
sunshine. The materials used, the travelled distance and the energy sources used during
the building process and during the life span of the building matters in a larger context
related to climate gas emission challenges but also for the individual’s economy, if
running costs are kept down. If local, renewable energy can be supplied as an affordable
commodity ensuring low running costs, that could be the preferred solution in many
instances. The winning projects and the honorary mentions were gathered in a book and
printed (UIA 1987).
Several proposals looked at the challenges faced by the fact that people themselves
does not initiate the majority of housing construction in the world but developers do, the
middle-man is the one who always seem to be in place and looking for profit. On the
other hand of the scale is the shelter building in poverty stricken areas where squatting
occurs. It is apparent that improvements are necessary on all levels.
One way of controlling the middleman domination is through housing authorities’ forcing
him, as a condition for issuing planning permission, to build some small low-cost flats at
a limited cost level set by the authorities. If say 25 percent of the flats in a development
are such non-speculative small flats, the middleman can do whatever he likes with the
remaining 75 percent. This will normally lead him at targeting the upper cost segment of
