Temporary housing environments in urban areas – challenges and key findings for implementation

Abstract

Cities are increasingly confronted with the need to provide shortterm and cost-efficient housing as several factors, such as natural disasters, migration due to political or climatic circumstances or other unpredictable events can result in a sudden and at times temporary need for additional housing. Providing affordable, and flexible but at the same time sustainable and re-useable housing concepts that are easy to construct and quickly to implement are thus requirements that cities must face. Currently there is limited research available in this field, as disaster architecture and temporary housing have not yet been widely researched in an interdisciplinary manner. The project “Urban pop-up housing environments and their potential as local innovation systems” has aimed at addressing this research gap by investigating in a highly interdisciplinary approach how and under which circumstances temporary housing solutions could be implemented under challenging framework conditions. The aim of the project was to systematically investigate and evaluate existing temporary housing options, and to develop and assess innovative and sustainable models for pop-up living systems in urban environments regarding resource uptake as well as social aspects, which may serve as incubators for urban innovation. From a technical perspective the models are focused on integrating aspects related to architecture, energy technologies, resources and materials, water as well as landscape design. Starting with a data pool of international examples, a classification and systematization of relevant typologies has been carried out in combination with user profiles for the different housing situations. On this basis, potential urban areas have been identified for selected scenarios and finally six theoretical temporary housing models have been created and subsequently assessed and analyzed in detail. The purpose of this paper is to present the key findings related to the scenarios and models, that have been developed within this basic research project and the methodologies that have been applied to assess them. The challenges of the scenarios and overall project results are summarized to provide an outline for potential implementation and future pilot projects.