Also, in order to overcome the housing emergency as a result of the doubling of the population in the industrial Paris of the 19th century, Hausmann undertakes radical interventions which brought the residential block, whose units accommodated families of different strata. The process of sanitizing and improving living conditions and infrastructure, produced a certain spatial paradigm that was based on elite class line of thinking.
The response came on a large scale, as well as on an architectural scale. Around 1830, a sanitary reform movement emerges in Britain in reaction to the deteriorating situation, with the goal of upgrading urban areas. Great public works projects, such as the installation of sewer and water infrastructure, as well as the building of parks and public spaces, were the solution to the prevailing conditions. This was the birth of the modern state.
Ebenezer Howard proposes "Garden Cities" as a remedy. The emphasis was on establishing a communal and neighborly sense amongst well placed cottages, which were initially intended to blend all socioeconomic strata. Some of these early nineteenth-century accommodations occurred organically, while others were the product of intentional governmental and philanthropic initiatives to allocate the growing number of impoverished workers. Social reform movements characterized Europe above all else in toward the end of the nineteenth century. This is the period in which philanthropists, utopians, entrepreneurs, and politicians through extensive investigative work into the living conditions of the working class and
due to this flexibility is the ability to create a vast range of possibilities that allow for various, even contradictory, perspectives and utilizations.
Additionally, Brand (1994) recommended that design should be whole in space and whole in time such completeness may be reached through the flexibility which can be approached by viewing a structure as a sequence of layers that vary throughout the course of the house's lifecycle. This is shown in the diagram below, where each layer has a certain length of life and their flexibility.
Figure 22 Redraw of Brand`s layer diagram Source: Author
Discussing about flexibility, we do recognize the role of time in relation with housing But this relationship is further elaborated by deriving such concepts as polyvalence. It has been firstly used in architecture field by Hertzberger (1991) Leupen expressed a discrepancy in the design process, while putting together the intention of establishing more accurately the habitant demands that a building should fulfill at the onset of its existence, and the building's current usage will differ from its intended use in the future. As he
