cooperative La Borda in Barcelona (see chapter by Parameswaran et al., and Cabré and Andrés 2018) that emerged from existing neighbourhood networks are run as cooperative ownerships that grant its tenants the right to use a dwelling, with particular concerns for affordable housing needs. Incorporating concepts for local economies both to both create revenue and nurture liveability in the neighbourhood and being participatorily designed, managed, and partly incrementally built with the support of social and spatial design experts, the project aligns with the concept of ‘Designing Coexistence’ (Rieniets et al. 2009) that was touched on above.
With this as an agenda, the curators of the ‘Open City – Designing Coexistence’ Biennale in Rotterdam (Rieniets et al. 2009) define a design culture that emphasizes the immersion of policymakers, activists, and designers into vulnerable contexts and the mapping of its socio‐economic conditions, resilience, and social capital as an important prerequisite for sustainable inclusivity‐minded interventions. The necessity to support such contexts in this way applies in particular for urban neighbourhoods in which the consequences of social disadvantage, demographic shifts, and global immigration are concentrated (Potz and Thies 2010), a central issue that can only be tackled with the provision of integration services and the participation of civil society (Potz and Thies 2010). Working on the ground with often participatory projects proposes design strategies as ‘catalysts’ and ‘animation of change’ to ‘facilitate more equitable and sustainable futures’ (Rieniets et al. 2009). ‘Designing coexistence’ combines social design and architectural design practice and pursues inclusive diversity rather as a win‐win scenario, by building upon existing social capital, by enabling communities, and by facilitating interaction and collaboration across different groups and interests. Putnam (1993) defines the benefits of such social capital – a network of relations between people jointly living in a particular socio‐spatial entity, allowing them to function effectively and for their mutual benefit. It enables cooperation, civic engagement, and collective wellbeing, based on norms of reciprocity and mutual trust.
A few, deliberately diverse references for such practices of inclusion, enabling, and empowering shall be briefly mentioned to illustrate the bandwidth of an inclusive urbanism.
‘Naturally Occurring Retirement Community’ (NORC) are bottom‐up organized senior communities that have organically evolved in New York, led by senior citizens preferring to age in place. Their proactive initiatives have been combined with public policies and made eligible for social services like home health care, transportation, education, and entertainment (Black et al. 2004).
The Caño Martín Peña community, an informal settlement along a canal in Puerto Rico's capital San Juan is a self‐initiated development and land‐use plan to relocate homes away from increasing flood hazards and pollution and improve their living conditions. Co‐developing the comprehensive plan through a sustained participatory engagement process, the dwellers also claimed for and established a Community Land Trust to avoid the gentrification and displacement often arising with such neighbourhood improvements. The land has been transferred by the government to sustain an inclusive community of about 2000 families, which now collectively owns and manages its own settlement (Stanchich 2017; Yarina et al. 2019).
For the inclusion of the youngest, Francesco Tonucci developed the concepts for ‘La città dei bambini’ (The City of Children), implemented by more than 200 communities worldwide (Alonso 2019). Rooted in the UN Children Rights Convention, it proclaimed the idea of children as citizens with a voice in decisions affecting their environs, to revise exclusionary decision‐making cultures for the making of cities that mainly had ‘the adult, male, worker in mind’.
The project ‘Who Cares?’ (see chapter by Parameswaran et al.), developed by the social design studio CareLab in collaboration with the Pumpkin Lab of the National Council of Social Services, caters for the inclusion of vulnerable seniors and disabled citizens staying at home by empowering relatives and transforming the caregiver experience in Singapore (PDA, President's Design Award Singapore 2018 2018) – a city with a rapidly ageing population and a social care system significantly relying on family support. Ethnographic research and social and spatial design strategies were combined with co‐creation workshops to re‐design the caregiving system and experiences, aiming to empower caregivers with a wide‐ranging set of services, tools, spaces, policies, programmes, and campaigns.
While these examples focus on enabling the inclusion of different groups with entire neighbourhoods in mind, I refer to three projects specifically aiming for inclusive housing (Heckmann 2017). Beyond giving a shelter to vulnerable populations, they again draw connections to the crucial aspects of empowerment, local integration and stabilizing of local economies: to provide housing for the 2011 Tsunami victims in Japan, Kunihiro Ando and Satoyama Architecture Laboratory designed timber houses following traditional techniques, with the intent of both reviving the local timber industry and boosting community spirit in Iwaki. Local carpenters taught residents how to incrementally build with wood and then make furniture from leftover materials, to strengthen bonds within the community and to enhance the emotional connections with one's shelter. Star Apartments, built in 2014 by Michael Maltzan Architects for homeless people in Los Angeles, had beyond the provision of shelter the aim to socially integrate the housing community into its neighbourhood – by co‐locating social interfaces also used by neighbours in the lower levels, like a medical clinic, a community wellness centre, and offices for health services and housing supply. Quinta Monroy, designed 2004 by Elemental in Iquique, Chile, is an often‐discussed affordable housing project. The aim was to sustain an informal community by legalizing and nurturing its vital economic and social networks – in lieu of often pursued evictions and enforced resettlements of entire neighbourhoods into places without any infrastructure. Houses with voids for future expansion were built to keep the initial price as affordable as possible and within the range of public subsidy policies, and to enable incremental additions needed for changing demands.
Also in other contexts, inclusion‐minded engagements for housing projects aim to avoid the often predominant segregation of vulnerable population in specialized settings: In Munich, the ‘Club for Disabled People and their Friends’ (CBF), proactively initiated the cohousing project ‘Johann‐Fichte‐Straße’ (Förster et al. 2020) under the umbrella of a cooperative housing association, to jointly organize an architecture competition and build an inclusive habitat for tenants with and without disabilities, in which the dweller's participation during both the design and construction process also helped to build a joint identity. An association of single people and single parents eligible for subsidized housing, an agency assisting with dementia cohousing, and dwellers seeking self‐occupied property liaised with each other to built ‘Sonnenhof’ (Förster et al. 2020), an inclusive, multigenerational housing community in Freiburg, Germany – with the advice of ‘Mietshäuser Syndikat’, which supports self‐organized, non‐profit housing projects.
Such examples cover a broad set of actors, initiatives, and strategies and illustrate the bandwidth of inclusion‐minded projects in contexts with vulnerable populations. They involve diverse stakeholders, a shift between top‐down and bottom‐up approaches, and combine spatial and social design instruments to pursue both social and economic sustainability as essential prerequisites for inclusivity. They consider communities as proactive agents, enable co‐presences and participation, and empower citizens to engage. With all these, it is important to consider the state of exclusion as a volatile condition that might not only affect those defined upfront to be vulnerable. Political, economic, and social conditions can easily shift and also threaten those with exclusion that considered themselves as integrated parts of urban societies. Consequently, agencies of engagement and inclusion have to be responsive and agile enough to react.
Six chapters – two by designers working in vulnerable and fragile urban contexts in Detroit and Indonesia, one by a research lab investigating urban communities, two by sociologists conducting research on affordable housing in Vienna and on the inclusivity of social networks in Singapore, and one by representatives of inclusive municipal policies in Barcelona – are included in this chapter to share their perspectives on inclusive urbanism. I'd like to thank Vincent Chua, Florian Heinzelmann and Daliana Suryawinata, Ian Dickenson, and Gerald Kössl for their feedback while working on this chapter.
Lluís