Future Housing Identities: Designing in Line with the Contemporary Sustainable Urban Lifestyle

Abstract

Over the past decade, urban housing typologies have evolved from being a feature of modern life to an essential postmodern issue, questioning future housing identities. One of the ways in which architecture can become engaged in this ever-changing process of urban regeneration is to challenge the inherited traditional housing typologies with the newly recognized values of contemporary lifestyle. This paper presents research and design aimed at exploring contemporary sustainable urban lifestyles as a resource for positioning housing structures as cultural urban infrastructure. The main focus of this study is design principles and strategies for generating future housing identities in accordance with sustainable urban development and sustainability of life in urban areas. It is about finding housing conceptual models for an interaction between housing and identity as a response to the impact of increased cities, changed lifestyles in contemporary cities and the requirements for the preservation of the city image and the public space within the housing areas in the city center. The main goal of this study is to understand whether and how an architectural design can preserve a sustainability of life within the city center and become a valuable agent of place identity in the process of urban regeneration. The paper indicates that the contemporary development of society requires a new architectural paradigm, in which lifestyle and architecture create a unique elastic open-ended system with the ability to adapt and change over time and throughout the place.