About: Europan 7 theme
SUB-URBAN CHALLENGE
URBAN INTENSITY AND HOUSING DIVERSITY
(session 2003/2004)

All towns are faced with the phenomenon of urban sprawl, splitting, and fragmentation. The increasing use of the car, the development of out-of-town shopping centres, the increase in the number of leisure complexes, and the extension of business/industrial parks, seem to be leading inexorably to a "dispersed town" urban model. There is, visibly, a new will to act in these contemporary areas, in order to reorganise them by reviving the traditional planning ethos of European towns, and by associating this with the challenges of urban sustainability.

Individual autonomy is increasing, as is the diversity of social interactions within the same family, professional mobility, and the speed of communications; all of which lead to a more spread out town. On the other hand, there is a strong demand for a neighbourhood social life which needs to be rebuilt on new foundations. Designers must be able to respond simultaneously to an increased demand for both stability and mobility: this notion can be expressed in terms of an anchorage rather than in terms of putting down roots. An anchor provides stability until you raise it to move on elsewhere."

EUROPAN 7 proposes to tackle this issue at the point of the interface between the urban planning level and the architectural level.

How can the dispersed town be transformed to a sustainable town with its foundations in the new social and cultural demands that are currently emerging? How can the creation of new residential districts, with innovative typologies and complex programme briefs, be fashioned into a strategic urban tool?

HOUSING DIVERSITY

Diversification is the main characteristic of the new demand for homes. Composite households, the young, the elderly, "nomads" (tourists or mobile professionals), have not found apt architectural responses in today's contemporary town. The housing product remains largely modelled on a limited number of types that are supposed to respond to all needs.

The issue for EUROPAN 7 is to initiate new thinking on research into typological innovation. How can appropriate housing perspectives be offered to town dwellers with myriad cultural and social profiles?

URBAN INTENSITY

The residential space proposed in the dispersed town is nearly always mono-functional. Residential zoning has produced the large social housing estate and the private estate of houses, treated as two extreme forms of segregated housing model, which prevent, by their spatial structure, all neighbourhood social intensification.

In today's contemporary town, how can one give housing districts a new dynamism, and favour the spatial intensification of the social life which can take place within them.

SUSTAINABLE PROCESS

Areas affected by urban sprawl have not stabilised. They have often been formed through an accumulation of partial logics, and a variety of disparate interventions without any thought for overall urban ecology. As such, they constitute a favourable field for analysis in terms of sustainable development. On a European scale, they cover a wide variety of forms and situations. Besides large, emblematic sites, liberated by industry, and which offer towns enormous scope for internal expansion, there is a wealth of potential in other more modestly sized, but nonetheless strategic plots of disused, and underused, land.

The aim of EUROPAN 7 is to work at research into principles of urban coherence in the dispersed town, but concentrating on specific elements that go beyond the historic principles of the old town, or of traditional urban composition.

How can new logics of urban assemblies be conceived, that are adapted to the fragmented, heterogeneous territory of the contemporary town? How can a landscape be created that, while enabling mobility, will offer elements of urban coherence and environmental quality?

Please download more detailed theme description here (.doc file, 41 kB).