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PhD: We should be proud of social housing

Date
04.04.2016
Category
Research and Innovation

Social housing is much better than its reputation and has creative potential, which is realised by the residents over the years. This should be a benchmark when, in the future, we renovate Denmark’s large plan constructions. This is the opinion of the architect, Heidi Svenningsen Kajita from KADK’s School of Architecture, who has written her PhD thesis on the subject of social housing.

Initially there was just a concrete block and a naked lawn. Now there are gardens in front of the block with motorcycles, shovels and roller-skates. In one particular housing association residents have created a recycling centre, which is now a pleasant social gathering place. Inside the flats, plasterboard walls have been ripped down or put up. At an Easter party, one resident even cut an arch in the wall between two rooms to provide more room for guests. And then there are the former air-raid shelters in the residential blocks. They can be used for a communal model railway or a gym.

These are examples of how residents in social housing complexes have personally taken the initiative to invest their rented homes with personal, collective value: of how they have exploited the “fragile potential” of the buildings.

You can read all about this in the architect, Heidi Svenningsen Kajita’s PhD thesis on the subject of the “fragile” potential of the large-scale housing estates of the 1960s and 1970s.

“The large housing estates of the 1960s and 1970s are often associated with problems. The architecture is considered to be poor-quality, monotonous concrete construction, leaving no room for personal expression,” she says. “Large-scale housing may not be ideal, but it represents people’s homes, and the buildings play an important role in the Danish welfare state, which we should be proud of and look after.”

Garden, Drottninghög
Entrance Albertslund South

Socially sustainable renovation

In her PhD thesis, Heidi Svenningsen Kajita has looked at how to transform and renovate large housing estates in a more socially sustainable manner: to uphold and take into account social relationships that have been built up over the years, and the qualities, which the residents have conferred on, and promoted in the buildings.  Unfortunately, when a residential block has been renovated, it is often the case that residents cannot return to the same homes or neighbours, or to the gardens they have cultivated for 50 years. One problem is that today the descriptions of services and materials for architects and planners focus mainly on technical factors and the provision of products for short-term solutions, because social sustainability objectives imply a focus on long-term prospects.

Read more

If you would like to read the thesis, ‘Fragile potential in large-scale plans: spatial and material dimensions of post-war large-scale housing estates at work’ it is available for loan at the Library. 

Fragile potentialer i de store planer