Up-Site housing - Official Community of Practice Blog
The concept of fast, cheap, integrated housing is fleeting unless it is strictly regulated, flexible and profitable to do so. Due to low cost construction, sub-standard design and low maintenance, housing in this range often results in overcrowded, unsightly and unhygienic conditions. Inevitably, neighboring real estate values fall, squatter or slums might develop and incidences of petty crime might increase.
The Ulaanbaatar Housing Corporation, the GIZ, and Hybrid House LLC built an energy saving housing development in Denjiin Myanga of Chingeltei district, Ulaanbaatar city, Mongolia. This is an effective and viable solution to the city’s cheap heating problem that produces carbon monoxide for its residents trying to keep warm.
“We are not against beauty, we are against superfluity,” Nikita Khrushchev told Soviet architects in 1954.
Speaking a year after Stalin's death, with the Soviet Union damaged by war and repression, Khrushchev ordered a nationwide effort to build housing cheaply and quickly. This, the most ambitious Soviet housing project, gave birth to the Khrushchevka — the distinctive five-story building named after the Soviet leader. Millions of Russians continue to live in them today.
Sixty years on, however, Moscow authorities have decided they have had enough of the Khrushchevka. In a meeting with President Vladimir Putin on March 1, Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced plans to demolish around eight thousand of the post-war buildings. This equates to 25 million square meters of living space and will involve re-housing 1.6 million people – the population of a small European capital. The decision took Muscovites by surprise. After all, the plans to demolish a large part of the city had not been discussed in any public sphere, let alone parliament. “They decided everything for us, once again,” prominent architect Yevgeny Asse told The Moscow Times, adding he first heard about the plans on television.
A truck transports parts of a Khrushchevka in 1960, Moscow, Soviet Union.
Read More https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2017/03/09/goodbye-khrushchev
Kowa Danchi Offers a Renewed Vision of Housing Projects in Japan
The Kowa Public Apartment Complex was planned in Mihama, a coastal town in Aichi prefecture that has suffered from depopulation. A number of 2 and 3-story danchi buildings built in the 1950s plagued with structural deterioration and vacancies were to be torn down and replaced. But rather than building up, the town wanted to prioritize a warmer style of living that was closer to the ground. One that would be friendly to parents raising children but also seniors. source: https://www.spoon-tamago.com/2018/11/12/kowa-danchi-public-housing-mihama/
Founded in Singapore in 2015, Pod Structures is a multi-disciplinary design and innovation start-up that produces solutions related to the field of modular and prefabricated construction. Earlier this week the firm launched its pilot modular home project called MOVIT.
Installed at the front lawn of the startup’s office and workshop facility on Loyang Street, the 32-square-metre modular home is decked as a studio apartment comprising a living-dining area, a bathroom and a bedroom.