Year: 2018
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Social sustainability has a number of features that complicate its direct study. It is simultaneously a state and a process, something hard to define but important to support. This research suggests a mediate approach. It states that built environment, and especially housing, inevitably reflects social processes within the urbanised society of today. Moreover, it views alternative housing as a self-adjustment mechanism of social sustainability that can be gradually converted into a tool deliberately used by architects, urban planners and authorities to firm city’s social sustainability.\n\nApparently, an unprecedented socio-economic pressure on housing nowadays causes its transformation and forms new, alternative, options that keep overall sustainability balanced. The current study presents an exemplary cross-section through this transformation edge. Its following in-depth exploration reveals internal and external forces that form the alternative housing trends. Further analysis suggests conditions, under which these marginal practices could be integrated into conventional development schemes and the role of architects in that integration.\n\nDue to the global scale of the research problem, the analysis is based on international projects. However, the trends are viewed through the prism of Finnish reality. The resulting comparison outlines trajectories for future exchange in experience and ideas in the fields of architecture and urban planning. \n\nIn addition to that, this thesis work should benefit general understanding of the relation between social sustainability and built environment. Further studies in this direction could eventually reveal possibilities to intentionally modify social sustainability processes through architecture and urban planning.
Author: Darina Bunak
Language: English
Subfield: Urban Studies
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2928959248