Urban pop-up housing environments and their potential as local innovation systems |
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Urban areas and growing cities such as Vienna are experiencing an increasing demand for temporary housing solutions. The reasons for requiring affordable temporary accommodation are manifold and span from the planned (educational training) to the unforeseen (natural disasters, migration). These forms of living should also be designed to be as sustainable as possible regarding the materials used, power supply or reusability.
These living concepts must be easily integrated into (currently) unused urban spaces and must allow waste-free living with low energy and water consumption. The unique feature of this WWTF-funded project lies in the consideration of temporary housing solutions as spaces for social learning and experimentation. These “interim solutions” become new elements of local innovation systems, offering a wide scope of possibilities to explore, apply and evaluate new technical and social concepts. In order to meet diverse needs and requirements involved in designing forward-looking temporary living models, technical, scientific, spatial planning and social science disciplines collaborate intensively. Using the example of the city of Vienna, six different models for different applications will be designed and tested with the help of different scientific methods, among others in the field of sustainability assessment and technology assessment. Another important part of the project will deals with the possible implementation of these models, which will be discussed with various decision-makers in Vienna.
Within the framework of the project, the ITA will closer examine the aspect of temporary housing as a space for innovative forms of interaction, integration and learning. For this we make use of methodological approaches from the field of constructive TA. Consequently it should be possible to use modern pop-up environments as strategic development spaces in which the preferences of the residents, the advantages and disadvantages of the applied solutions and the unintended side-effects and risks can be detected at an early stage.
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