Logement social | EPFL Graph Search

Un logement social est un logement destiné, à la suite d'une initiative publique ou privée, à des personnes qui ont des difficultés à se loger le plus souvent pour des raisons financières. L'expression sert aussi à désigner le secteur économique constitué par ce marché immobilier et les politiques d'économie sociale qui président à son administration. En Europe, le logement passe par diverses traditions et des histoires nationales qui toutes visent à l’encadrement des loyers et à plus ou moins d'extension du logement social. Contrairement aux termes « public housing » aux États-Unis, en Grande-Bretagne ou habitation à loyer modéré en France, le terme en Allemagne ne réfère pas au statut public ou privé du propriétaire. Plus de 90 % des Sozialwohnungen ont été construits par des investisseurs privés, brouillant la frontière entre public et privé qui structure les représentations et les usages du logement social dans d’autres pays. Le secteur du logement social reste quantitativement

New Vernacular Architecture as Appropriate Strategy for Housing the Poor

Sytse de Maat

Improving living conditions of the poor often involves a drastic change in lifestyle, in order to fit daily life into industrially produced dwellings. Slum rehabilitation programs replacing informal settlements with standardized mass housing, have often resulted in a mismatch of inhabitants and their built environment. Participation strategies meant to counter this problem, show little effect unless the user is in charge. What is the problem with development and participation? This chapter will discuss ‘housing the poor’ as a case to illustrate how industrialization and systemization are at odds with participation. We will consider two ways of producing housing: industrial mass housing, and informal settlement. The focus is on the connectedness of the user, the inhabitant, with his dwelling. It will lead to the observation that participation aims at meeting the diversity that is natural to human beings, whereas systemization requires and produces the opposite: uniformity. Moreover, the term user-participation implicitly states the user is an outsider participating in developers' projects, which after all are dominated by the interests of the construction industry. An Appropriate Technology - approach in housing the poor would benefit from a focus on user-building interaction as it taps directly into people’s most powerful resource: creativity. Western systemization is not the only route to improvement. Strategies based on vernacular are at least as effective, appropriate, and humanly sustainable.

Springer Verlag2012

New Vernacular Architecture as Appropriate Strategy for Housing the Poor

Sytse de Maat

Springer Verlag2012

Towards sufficiency in housing: Agent-based model and transition scenarios

Margarita Agriantoni

Research problem: Housing is responsible for a considerable part of global resource consumption. In Switzerland, it accounts for almost one third of the country's CO2 emissions and half of the total energy demand. Thus, housing plays an important role in the transition to sustainable development. Housing has been thoroughly studied from a disciplinary perspective, e.g., economics, social sciences, psychology, engineering. However, little attention has been paid to housing as a system of interrelated actors, e.g., developers, owners, tenants and state, whose actions might be described by different disciplines. Aim: The aim of this thesis is to investigate how a change in the construction practices of property owners in combination to a more space-efficient allocation of dwellings to households and a behavioural change of tenants can achieve a substantial reduction in the environmental impact of housing. This dissertation focuses on the interrelations of housing actors, concentrating mainly on the property owners and explores which measures and to what extent can lead to a reduction of space consumption of housing.Methods: Housing is characterised by a high level of complexity, therefore a transdisciplinary approach is adopted. Firstly, the Swiss housing market and its unique attributes are studied. However, in this thesis, we study a subset of the Swiss rental housing market; it comprises two housing cooperatives: ABZ in Zurich and SCHL in Lausanne as well as the insurer and asset manager Swiss Mobiliar. Their housing stocks, of approximately 10,000 dwellings, are examined in depth and are used as a case study. Extensive data gathering allowed to create an exhaustive inventory of the building stock of the three property owners. The data on tenants was limited, thus, we conducted a tenant survey. Furthermore, a series of workshops with both tenants and property owners were organised to study their decision-making processes. A bottom-up agent-based model (ABM) is built, which portrays the case study housing system. The main actors of the rental housing market (property owners and households) are represented in the model by agents; the owner agents make decisions about their building stock and tenants, while the household agents choose a dwelling based on their needs and housing preferences. The dynamic evolution of both owners and households and the interaction between them is simulated in the model and allows the study of emergent phenomena. The present thesis attempts the assessment of the environmental impact of housing through the lens of housing sufficiency. Space consumption, in terms of dwelling surface and floor area per capita, is considered as the largest determinant of resource consumption.Results: The simulation results show that measures taken to decrease the environmental impact of housing and space consumption are inadequate if owners do not change their construction practices and households do not actively change their housing behaviour. Most measures explored in this thesis, if implemented individually, succeed in reducing the rate of increase in space consumption but fail to reverse the upward trend. A more space-efficient allocation of dwellings to households proves to have a certain effect. However, only when combined with other measures, such as the densification of the existing building stock and a change in construction practices, a significant decrease of environmental impact is observed.

EPFL2022

Towards sufficiency in housing: Agent-based model and transition scenarios

Margarita Agriantoni

EPFL2022