Interventions of rehabilitation in large housing estates built during the period 1950-1975

Abstract

Objective

The objective of this research is to provide an updated state of the art of the interventions of rehabilitation in large housing estates built during the period of 1950-1975 in Europe, especially those interventions that focused on the modification of physical aspects, with the aim of providing analytic instruments that can be applied in future research on the implementation of verified intervention models.

Methodology

This work is based on the study of the abundant existing casuistic of interventions carried out in European housing estates during the last decades since the moment of construction, considering the very diverse procedures and scales of transformations that vary from those oriented to the maintenance and rehabilitation of the original housing estate to the demolition of the totality of buildings and complete urban redevelopment of the site.

The study of different cases is used to elaborate a classification of the forms of intervention that provides a compared analysis of the existing casuistic, both regarding the instruments of intervention and their scale and impact on different housing estates and contexts.

Finally, the elaboration of compared chronologies of interventions according to each study case and each different county provides a further understanding of the evolution and current tendency of the forms of intervention.

Conclusions

The comprehensive understanding of the executed interventions in each studied housing estate envisions a progressive diversification of instruments of intervention aiming at achieving impact on the global scale. Nevertheless, it is noticeable how neither the different forms of intervention or the scale of their economic investments have been able to guarantee, in the studied cases, a long-term solution to the real problematics that had motivated their development and implementation. The success of a physical intervention of rehabilitation in an urban and social reality highly depends on the consideration of the real forms of incidence in the diverse physical sales and social situations that influence behaviours and aspirations of the resident population.

Originality

The present paper offers a classification of the diverse forms of physical intervention that have been implemented in several study cases. A contribution that provides a comparative analysis of the forms of intervention and their evolution in time according to each studied case and country, offering a panoramic review of the European context from a transversal perspective.