Herausforderungen des sozio-demographischen Wandels für die Wohnbauindustrie

Abstract

Abstract Regional development is best understood as an assemblage of physical flows, such as ageing housing stocks, which demand physical and conceptual renewal; social aggregations, which change in age patterns and collective aspirations; economic organizations, which search profitable modes of capital accumulation. This article focuses on one possible assemblage and asks how the connection of changing social constructions of age, demographic trajectories, spatial patterns of the built environment and demographic segregation, and the decision-making processes of real estate investors can open up the potential to tackle the dissatisfactory housing situation of elderly people in the rental housing market. After a brief introduction into our area under investigation and our research problem, section two outlines the qualitative and quantitative methods we use to analyze both the demand and the supply in the rental housing market segment for elderly people. Furthermore, it introduces the investigation region, which is the central metropolitan area of Zurich in Switzerland. Section three discusses the changing housing needs of elderly people. Section four introduces the empirical findings in the above-mentioned fields of investigation. These individual results are integrated in section five in order to map an assemblage of social, physical and economic facts and tendencies that define the potential to address the problem under investigation in new ways.