Mass Factory Housing: Design and Social Reform

In the past, housing and homeownership have been used as media for social reform. This article looks at the socio-political agenda behind the birth of company towns and the role of architecture and urban design in shaping the social life of the inhabitants. The study examines Cité Ouvrière, a nineteenth-century mass factory settlement in Mulhouse (France), which provided workers with access to property. Through literature, archival, and design research, this article traces the incremental transformation of a uniform working-class housing scheme into an ethnically diverse and formally heterogeneous city quarter

Agents of Change in the Domestic Built Environment

As our cities age, a large number of spatial structures experience physical change. A better understanding of what this process may entail and the agents involved in it can extend the knowledge of practitioners, activists, and policy experts regarding the resilience of our domestic building stock and cities. Awan et al. (2013) explain that agents are not entirely free from societal and spatial constraints; instead, they are characterised by intent, shaped by their own visions and actions, and context, the spatial and social structures of which they are part and which they negotiate. This article discusses the intent and context of the agents involved in the construction and transformation of the Cité Ouvrière in Mulhouse in Eastern France from the mid-19th century to date. With 1,253 houses built for the workers of the Dollfus-Mieg et Compagnie (DMC) textile factory between 1853 and 1897, Cité Ouvrière was the largest and most successful employer-constructed housing scheme of its time, setting an example for many other European company towns. Through this exceptional case study, the article identifies the levels at which spatial agents operate, the means they use to instigate change, their dynamic relations, and the ways these are influenced by the wider historical context while influencing the making and evolution of the built form. Using historical and archival documents, it amounts to recognise an interplay of individuals and public and private groups, who have been responsible for taking decisions at different scales - the city, the neighbourhood, and the houses - and have instigated changes of different effect - from more localised to more aggregate

Housing growth: impacts on density, space consumption and urban morphology

How and why do houses densify over time? What is the impact of that growth and what kind of constraints affect their potential to change? This research explores built form change and densification, providing historical evidence from the incremental transformation of a 19th-century housing scheme, Cité Ouvrière, in Mulhouse, eastern France. This granular longitudinal morphological study uses historical planning applications and images to map the external volumetric transformations of 1253 single-family houses over a 165-year period. The research combines archival work with three-dimensional (3D) architectural modelling and an advanced density method to record, visualise, analyse and evaluate the densification process at the microlevel. Statistical computing traces the densification process and the Spacematrix tool analyses the impact on open space consumption for different building typologies and for the neighbourhood as a whole. The results highlight seven types of transformations, affected by seven drivers of physical change. Densification is manifested either through built intensification or plot union/subdivision, and its degree is determined by the extent to which non-built space is consumed. These depend on socioeconomic, legal and physical constraints imposed by the original design

Formal Adaptability: A Discussion of Morphological Changes and their Impact on Density in Low-Rise Mass Housing

Upon building completion, housing value starts diminishing over time. If it fails to fulfil stakeholders’ long-term needs, the building becomes obsolescent. While some housing schemes survive, others do not, being inflexible in changes over time. This paper explores physical adaptability as a design characteristic that other things being equal, adds to longterm viability in urban housing. It addresses the topic by investigating the adaptability of urban form and the impact of physical adaptations on space consumption and density in low-income mass residential developments. It studies urban form, buildings, plots and streets in and for themselves independent of their use. The objective is to understand how the three elements adapt over time and which morphological characteristics determine their capacity to adapt, a property that may contribute to greater socio-spatial sustainability in the built environment. Taking ‘Cité Ouvrière’ as an example –a working-class housing scheme in Mulhouse (France)– the paper traces its transformation process from its birth till the beginning of 21st century. First, it focuses on the adaptability of the streets using space syntax analysis. Having the local network resisting to changes over time, its degree of adaptability has been subject to three factors: the morphology of blocks, the evolution of the wider city network, and the configurational relation of the two local and global networks. The second part of the paper discusses the building and plot types of Cité Ouvrière and their bottom-up typo-morphological evolution. Based on empirical and archival data, the study identifies eight ‘mechanisms’ of physical change and examines their impact on the built density using Berghauser Pont and Haupt’s Spacematrix density model at the level of building-plot compounds. Ultimately, the same model is used to describe the degree of adaptability as a matter of built density for four housing typologies. For buildings and plots, adaptability refers to their ability to accommodate effectively changes in their form over time. In the context of Cité Ouvrière, physical adaptations have transformed an initially uniform garden city into a morphologically heterogeneous and compact urban quarter. Despite the original standardisation, a variety of formal outcomes and typological mutations have emerged as a result of three morphological characteristics inherent in the original design: location within the city, low built intensity and small plot coverage providing surplus open space

Long-term challenges in urban housing: in the search for intersections between design and policy regulations

Current discussions on urban housing confirm the central role of design in dealing with the rapidly increasing complexities of urban challenges. Nonetheless, design often remains detached from decision-making at the level of building regulations and urban policies. Situated around the debate of greater socio-spatial sustainability, this paper aims to an integrated understanding of housing performance devising an analytical discussion of both the design and the policy-making approaches. To explore the interplay of design with policy and regulations, the paper looks at historical housing transformations in different contexts. It focuses on those morphological, spatial and legal affordances that, once embedded into the design of urban housing, can contribute to its sustainability over time. In response to numerous studies of disurbanism and failures of housing interventions in the cities, this paper examines in turn long-standing housing schemes, which remain relevant in space and time. The selected case studies cover a range of different urban housing types from highly mixed-use to pure residential: originally planned row housing in West Village, Manhattan, NYC and Islington, London, UK, and low-rise mass housing in Cité Ouvrière, Mulhouse, France. Comparative results indicate the significance of the following contributing factors to those settlements’ long-term viability: the flexibility of both regulations and building morphology (buildings, plots and blocks) at the various scales of the built environment; the combination of policies and management by various stakeholders at different levels; and the inherent spatio-temporal relation of the schemes with the urban whole. Overall, the paper seeks to inform the design of future housing through an evidence-based understanding of the impact of form and policies in housing longevity. Results suggest that there are certain, cross-cultural, spatial properties acting as shared factors between the practice of architectural design and urban housing governance

Designed and emergent tectonics: resituating architectural knowledge

Architecture is usually defined through intent while cities come into being out of multiple human actions over a long period of time. This seems to trap us between a view of architecture as authored object, and a view of the city as authorless, evolutionary process. The debate about the autonomous and the contingent object thus, goes back to the separation of architecture from its skill base in craft and building practice that took place in the Renaissance. This separation also includes the operations through which buildings and cities are produced by designers, clients, users, regulatory codes, markets and infrastructures. The resurgence in the debate on the competing claims of autonomy and contingency testifies that since the Renaissance we have failed to develop theories and techniques that address the relationship between authored architecture and authorless contexts. As a result, coupled with commercial forces, recent advancements in digital technology and complexity theory claim architecture and the city as self-organization, dismantling architecture and depriving it from relevance in shaping social capital. If in the Renaissance, architecture was separated from the city, which was the relationship between the ways in which a city was built and the urban fabric? How can we better understand the relationship between the architectural project and the processes that configure the urban structure in which it is situated? This paper argues that for architecture to reclaim its scope as a social discipline it needs to theorise its relationship with the social, the political and the economic processes of its context