Livable neighborhoods: reflecting on public housing in basque countryside villages

Authors

  • Ezequiel Collantes Gabella Departamento de Arquitectura de la UPV/EHU https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7315-6389
  • Aritz Diez Oronoz Departamento de Arquitectura de la UPV/EHU
  • Ainara Sagarna Aramburu Departamento de Arquitectura de la UPV/EHU

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5821/jida.2025.13609

Keywords:

collective housing, productive neighborhood, residential typologies, sustainable architecture, vernacular architecture

Abstract

The work conducted in this course proposes a reflection on the suburbanisation process held in the peri-urban rural areas of the Basque Country. This teaching method promotes that reflection by approaching the architectural design as a speculative tool, understanding it as a creative and reflective process that allows us to imagine potential futures in situations related to contemporary territorial and urban challenges. These challenges are transferred to the design project through models and references that have been successfully proved, guiding the work towards strategies capable of responding adequately to low-density non-urban contexts and able to attend to the everyday lives of their inhabitants. Beyond being an exercise limited to the teaching sphere and bounded to the selected working areas, the projects carried out by our students display real alternatives, based on viable and successful models that can be applied in other contexts.

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Author Biographies

Ezequiel Collantes Gabella, Departamento de Arquitectura de la UPV/EHU

Ezequiel Collantes holds a degree in architecture from the EHU School of Architecture and is an Assistant Professor of Architectural Design at the same school. He holds a Master's degree in design and rehabilitation of architectural structures from the UPC. He obtained his PhD in Architecture from the ETS Arquitectura of the University of the Basque Country in 2015.

Aritz Diez Oronoz, Departamento de Arquitectura de la UPV/EHU

Aritz Díez Oronoz holds a degree in architecture from the School of Architecture at the EHU and is an Assistant Professor of Architectural Design at the same school. He holds a Master's degree in restoration, rehabilitation, and management of existing buildings from the EHU. He obtained his PhD in the Architecture School of the University of the Basque Country in 2019.

Ainara Sagarna Aramburu, Departamento de Arquitectura de la UPV/EHU

Ainara Sagarna is an architect from the School of Architecture at the EHU and an Associate Professor in the Department of Architectural Design at the same school. She finished her PhD in the University of the Basque Country in 2016.

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Published

2025-10-28

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