The Poetics of Adequate Urban Housing

AUID series presents texts extracted from the final doctoral dissertations of the Doctoral Program in Architectural Urban Interior Design (AUID) at Politecnico di Milano, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies.

Editor

Michele Porcelluzzi

Graphic Design

Francesco Trovato

AUID Head

Alessandro Rocca

AUID Scientific Board

Fabrizia Berlingieri, Guya Bertelli, Marco Biraghi, Marco Borsotti, Marco Bovati, Luigi Cocchiarella, Emilia Corradi, Pierre Alain Croset, Valentina Dessì, Andrea Di Franco, Immacolata C. Forino, Roberto Gigliotti, Andrea Gritti, Stamatina Kousidi, Camillo Magni, Laura Montedoro, Valerio Paolo Mosco, Marco Navarra, Filippo Orsini, Orsina Simona Pierini, Matteo Poli, Gennaro Postiglione, Sara Protasoni, Alessandro Rocca, Alessandro Rogora, Pierluigi Salvadeo, Luigi Spinelli, Ilaria Valente

AUID series

These agile booklets document the research carried out within our doctoral program. We decided not to publish the entire doctoral works, which are extensive and articulated, but to, instead, select and extract, from those scientific concentrates of sophisticated knowledge, the most comprehensible studies that are obviously associated with themes of the current debate on architectural design. These texts have, therefore, been forcibly stripped of their premises, of the state of the art and apparatus overview. They have, at times, even been disconnected from the broader rationale they belonged to. Hence, it is an arbitrary and, sometimes, unjust process, if we consider the scientific coherence of the original constructs. However, dear reader, we assure you that it was done with the best of intentions, an effort aimed at building a small, solid and well-designed bridge between the elite world of academic research and the fluid, open and permeable to discussion, updates of the critical evolution of contemporary architectural design.

Alessandro Rocca

Foreword Alessandro Rogora

Prologue: The Cornerstones of Sustainability and Adequate Urban Housing

Exposé: Re-drafting Theory

Epilogue: Contemporary Collaborative Housing Models: A Pragmatic Answer to the Contemporary Urbanization?

Foreword

Alessandro Rogora

In the 1970s, the term sustainability entered our daily life forcefully. It was the time of the oil crisis and the older ones among us still remember car-free Sundays. Saving energy became a must not only for transport but also for building design, even if it was a sort of flash in the pan which did not profoundly change our approach when the cost of energy went down.

The impact of environmental pollution was the next major visible effect of human activities. It was not directly related to the scarcity of natural resources but rather to people’s behavior. Relocation of industrial production apparently and temporarily succeeded in mitigating the effects of pollution on the environment, but then, the effects on a global scale started becoming increasingly visible. In the case of buildings, relocation is not possible, and in the last decade more and more attention has been paid to the efficiency of buildings and the implementation of low-impact solutions.

From efficiency, interest has shifted to sufficiency; while efficiency is about doing things right, sufficiency is about doing things right. The last step is the focus on adequacy. An adequate solution takes into account social needs within the wider set of ecological limits. The term adequacy opens up to a new and more complete vision of sustainability and Maryam Khatibi’s research represents an important scientific contribution to the development of this vision in the design of the built environment.

Alessandro Rogora

Prologue: The Cornerstones of Sustainability and Adequate Urban Housing

Urban housing as an integral element of the urban environment is facing various environmental, economic and social complex situations, with most of related challenges regarding the broad practice of sustainability. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, urban housing has encountered the fundamental challenge of sustainability, strengthened by environmental, economic and social discourses, which have caused additional concerns about contemporary housing practices. Such challenges, furthermore, have widened the scope of urban housing in order to analyze and solve problems, to develop new concepts, methods, and approaches, to question old assumptions and to reach new solutions. Accordingly, the recent challenges concerning urban housing have shown readiness to understand the potential of the United Nation’s (UN) Agenda 2030 for sustainable development adopted in 2015, which is centering around 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), with SDG 11 focusing on sustainable cities and communities and including environmental, economic, and social sub-goals such as adequate and affordable housing, reduction of environmental impacts of cities, and inclusive cities1.

While the concept of sustainable development is seen as a recent, conscious societal goal, over the last decades numerous research studies have been carried out on housing and its dynamics with classical sustainability. Recognizing this fact, the emergence, first, of socio-economic concerns and, second, of environmental ones have pushed efforts and solution-based

Prologue: The Cornerstones of Sustainability and Adequate Urban Housing

Maryam Khatibi | The Poetics of Adequate Urban Housing endeavors in sustainable housing (Nicol, 2013). This notwithstanding, the contemporary built environment has an eye on sustainable approaches, which have the potential to meet the challenges of more ecological-social-economical sustainable correlations.

The Three Es of Sustainability

The word sustainable has a Latin root as it is derived from ‘sustenere’, which means to uphold or being able of being maintained in a certain condition (Lawrence, 2006, p. 111). The concept of sustainable development emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s as the result of two interconnected crises: the ecological crisis due to the environmental damages caused by industrialization, and the related urban crisis, which motivated the emergence of sustainable urbanism (Whitehead, 2011).

The publications acknowledged for raising serious concerns and guiding the modern environmental movement are Silent Spring2 (Carson, 1962), The Population Bomb3 (Ehrlich, 1971), soon followed by Limits to Growth4 (Meadows et al., 1972) published by Club of Rome, and A Blueprint for Survival5 (Goldsmith and Allen, 1972). The report of Limits to Growth raised awareness of the potential global environmental crisis and the consequences of the rapid increase in world population and limited resource supply. Later, ‘Our Common Future’: Report of Brundtland Commission:

the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED, 1987) 6 established the concept of sustainable development by emphasizing on the importance of finding strategies to promote social and economic development in such a way as to prevent environmental pollution.

Consequently, several international conferences and meetings were organized on the concept of sustainable development, where the future of urban environments got influenced by sustainable urban and regional developments.

Drawing upon the Brundtland report on sustainable development, The International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home (Smith, 2012, p. 92) put forward that sustainable housing development refers to a housing development that “meets the housing needs and improves the housing conditions of this generation without compromising the ability of future generation to do the same”. Housing as a basic need of human beings is interdependent on environment, society, and economy, and the objective of sustainable urban housing is to establish a housing concept that is aligned with principles of sustainable development. However, the need for sustainable housing is not a new determining value or a novel consideration. In the first century BC, Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius developed a set of architectural principles today known as The Ten Books on Architecture, a work consisting of planning and design guidelines on various aspects of buildings (Vitruvius, 2010). In Book VI Vitruvius explained the

Cornerstones of Sustainability and Adequate Urban Housing

Prologue:

Maryam Khatibi | The Poetics of Adequate Urban Housing

importance of climatic considerations in design, meaning that different climates required different design approaches, and explained the importance of proper exposure of different rooms to light and warmth of the sun. Moreover, in Book VIII, Vitruvius explained the importance of collecting and reusing water for cooking, drinking, and showering. J. Owen Lewis (2011) in his book A Green Vitruvius argues that the sustainable principles outlined by Vitruvius can also be applied into today’s design patterns.

Likewise, the contribution of housing to sustainable development was mentioned by the Brundtland Commission (Hodge, 1997), and was applied by many sustainable housing researchers (Winston and Pareja Eastaway, 2008).

Furthermore, Nicol (2013) argued that the origins of the sustainable urban housing movement were some socio-economic considerations in the early twentieth century. As industrial cities of the nineteenth and early twentieth century provided extremely unhealthy housing conditions (Krieger and Higgins, 2002), in the early twentieth century, in Europe and North America, activists started to deal with the socio-economic concerns of urban housing such as adequacy, accessibility, affordability, and sanitation (Perdue et al., 2003).

On the other hand, the energy crisis of the 1970s contributed to raising awareness of environmental sustainability in the building construction sector, bringing the energy efficiency concept and fossil fuel dependency concerns into the housing debates (Cole,

2004; Nicol, 2013). Therefore, the emergence of, first, socio-economic concerns, and, second, environmental concerns pushed efforts and solution-based endeavors in sustainable housing.

It has been argued that the “three Es” of the sustainable development framework, i.e., Ecology, Economy, and (social) Equity, have been criticized from the very beginning by the reformist and revisionary approaches (Shirazi and Keivani, 2019, p. 2). The reformist approach accepts the three Es of sustainable development, but it argues on the holistic balance and coordination between the three Es to achieve greater sustainability (Winston and Pareja Eastaway, 2008; Boyer et al., 2016; Peterson, 2016; Shirazi and Keivani, 2019). According to the reformist approach, when there is a strong interaction among the three aspects of sustainable development, the goal of sustainability is achieved. For instance, according to Peterson (2016), sustainability is an integrated concept, and social7 aspects are imbedded into environmental and economic aspects in a non-recognized way. However, the revisionist approach disputes the all-inclusivity of the three Es and asks for a multi-pillar or even a totally new format (Duxbury and Jeannotte, 2010; Soini and Birkeland, 2014; Leal Filho et al., 2016). According to the revisionist approach, some pillars are missing that are those of culture, livability, and ethical values: these must be included in sustainability debates. Soini and Birkeland (2014, p. 214) put forward that:

Prologue: The Cornerstones of Sustainability and Adequate Urban Housing

Cluster apartment typology in Mehr als Wohnen, Zurich.