Rethinking temporary housing and fostering networks of cities
Next steps in La Fabrique de la Cité’s research project on European cities and refugees
A question of resilience: The place of temporary and evolutive housing in cities
“Networks of mutual assistance abet migrants’ integration process, and these networks usually rely on residential proximity”, writes Doug Saunders, author of The Arrival City[1]. Indeed, refugees and asylum-seekers who have recently arrived in cities often aspire to settle in neighborhoods where a preexisting community of similar regional or national origin can be found, and where they can hope to benefit from the assistance and knowledge of individuals with whom they share cultural and linguistic commonalities.
But while geographical concentration along citizenship lines within the city might create short-term opportunities for refugees and smooth their arrival period, the disadvantages of this configuration ultimately outweigh its merits: the concentration of refugees of the same national or regional origin within segregated urban enclaves may well increase the likelihood that preexisting local populations will greet these clusters of newly-arrived residents with negative reactions, as exemplified by the Hamburg demonstrators protesting the settlement of refugees in wealthier neighborhoods. A uniform distribution of these new inhabitants in the city’s various neighborhoods may effectively help diffuse any preexisting biases held by the local population, thus increasing chances of successful integration: while “immigration takes place, first and foremost, at the neighborhood level” (Doug Saunders[2]), so does integration. Thus, Jürgen Friedrichs notes that “empirical studies clearly show that interethnic contact evokes sympathy towards the minority and reduces discrimination”[3].
Beyond promoting interactions between refugees and local populations, a balanced distribution of newly-arrived refugees throughout the city can help ensure that they are connected to a dense urban network of social and physical infrastructure and to the locations where employment opportunities may be found. It is this careful examination of the quality of existing connections to employment opportunities and social infrastructure that explains the success encountered by the Notkestrasse 2 refugee housing complex our working group visited in Altona, Hamburg: “We have a lot of social infrastructure in the direct neighborhood. It is very important so that [refugees] can get help from here,” notes Imogen Buchholz, Social Welfare, Youth, and Health Representative for the District Authority of Altona.
Numerical evidence further supports the idea that segregation of refugees within urban enclaves is detrimental to successful integration, specifically as it hinders prospects for integration into the labor market. Thus, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that “evidence from Sweden and Denmark suggests that when the design of humanitarian migrant dispersal policies overlooks employment-related factors, migrants’ employment prospects may be badly affected and they may have to put up with lower employment rates and wages for many years after initial settlement”.
Public transportation has a significant part to play in connecting refugees to nodes of employment in the city: as noted by the Migration Policy Institute, “it is difficult to overestimate the value of public transportation investments in facilitating social inclusion and access to opportunities in cities where employment is scattered in nodes throughout the metropolitan area.”[4] Doug Saunders adds that “a targeted transportation intervention to increase migrants’ access to urban centers can remove long-term barriers to social mobility.”[5]
The previous elements appear to advocate for housing refugees by finding, repurposing, and optimizing existing spaces inside the city, rather than enticing refugees into ill-connected peripheries (through, for instance, greenfielding) with sparse job opportunities, rare or subpar social infrastructure, and significant physical distance from the nexus of city life. Thus, the Federal Chamber of German Architects writes that “fundamentally, the primacy of inner-city development over suburban/rural development applies, as especially for socially deprived groups, it is essential that sites be integrated into the respective locality and have good infrastructure.”[6] But how can the already tense housing markets boasted by dense European cities rise to this challenge?
Meeting housing demand while ensuring affordability: A complex equation
The growing housing affordability problem European cities must now contend with concerns their ability to provide housing not just to current or future refugees in the aftermath of potential demographic shocks, but more generally to their low-income population -if not middle-class ones in expensive metropolises- in a context of increasing economic inequalities
In this regard, solving the refugee housing challenge should be seen by cities not simply as an isolated necessity but as an opportunity to initiate a broader, multi-stakeholder reflection on how to address the rarefaction of affordable housing for low-income households in dense urban areas[7] subject to demographic pressure and rising rents.
Additionally, the refugee crisis is an opportunity for cities to increase their resilience by redefining the place of temporary housing within their housing offer. The question of how to welcome all entails the exploration of methods of provision of appropriate temporary housing for all individuals with short-term housing needs, whether they be refugees, entrepreneurs with a short-term project, or newly-divorced individuals. The commonalities between these various situations is already hinted at by several innovative projects that have mixed refugees with other populations with similar short-term needs: in Amsterdam, Startblok Riekerhaven houses both young refugees and Dutch youths; similarly, our working group recently met with Marie-Therese Harnoncourt-Fuchs, founder and partner of Austrian architecture firm the next ENTERprise, whose contribution to the Venice Biennale of Architecture, which consisted in transforming two floors of Siemens’s former Viennese headquarters into temporary housing, mixes unaccompanied minors and other young refugees with Austrian students.
Complex interwoven challenges arise out of the choice to house refugees within cities, close to employment opportunities and social infrastructure and amidst preexisting communities. Among these challenges, the identification of (partially or entirely) unused spaces, lots, buildings and facilities owned by the city, the affordability of housing in dense urban areas subject to fast-rising demand, and the necessity to work with, and sometimes around, rigid common-law regulations not appropriate to the handling of urgent situations.
Promoting better knowledge of housing stock and available lots
As evidenced by the outcomes of Hamburg’s “Finding Places” project, the successful identification of available plots that a city may use to temporarily accommodate refugees is a sizeable challenge, only compounded by the dearth of information on empty and useable lots on the urban territory. How can cities better know their own potential, from available and constructible plots to unoccupied buildings or facilities? A possible lead might consist in identifying, within a given city, all of the unoccupied plots where solid structures may be constructed, or, alternatively, where containers might be installed. To that end, cities could harness the potential of data visualization to identify constructible spaces, as pioneered by “Finding Places”. Cities famously suffer from an incomplete vision of the assets they own as well as the characteristics of these assets (“most cities have poor knowledge of what assets they own”, writes Dag Detter[8]) and may thus benefit from compiling databases on available lots within their territory, complete with actionable data on accessibility, proximity to employment and education opportunities, or commercial attractiveness.
Boosting urban housing markets through sensible regulatory changes
As evidenced by the low conversion rate of the “Finding Places” project, which found hundreds of available lots rejected on legal or regulatory grounds, the mere availability of constructible lots evidently does not suffice, per se, to solve the housing crisis. The demographic shock caused by the arrival of tens of thousands of refugees into the heart of European cities from 2015 on has shown that traditional regulations are ill-fitted to the urgency of temporary housing construction, making a powerful case for easing said regulations in order to facilitate the establishment and construction of temporary accommodation[9]. Germany pursued this course at the federal level by relaxing the Federal Building Code, the Renewable Energy Heating Act, and the Energy Saving Ordinance[10]. It is worth noting, of course, that introducing increased regulatory flexibility does not and should not equate accepting a significant lowering of housing standards or the greenlighting of subpar residential construction.
Hamburg State Secretary for Labor, Social and Family Affairs and Integration Jan Pörksen credits Germany’s willingness to soften applicable regulation for the success of Hamburg’s emergency housing plan for refugees in a dense urban territory and under tight time constraints: “We went to the Federal level and said we needed easier construction laws to build accommodation for refugees. Now we have the possibility to move a step further, if we can prove that we have a need for new public shelters, which we actually did before the court. We can now go ahead and build in areas that are normally not for apartment-building.”
The International Federation for Housing and Planning recently noted that “in many European countries urban land management and use is inefficient and is not available for affordable housing at a scale that is required due to inappropriate regulations and zoning”[11]. Zoning regulations, too, have a significant role to play in alleviating pressure on the housing market in densely populated and built urban areas: by encouraging repurposing and flexibility of uses, by promoting the rise of mixed-use lots, regulation can increase the available housing stock market by allowing residential construction in areas previously reserved exclusively to other uses (commercial, etc.). Cities have much to gain from envisioning the challenge of temporary housing for refugees as a pilot program to experiment with the repurposing of different types of lots and buildings into housing. Solutions of this type are fast emerging: for instance, Austria’s relaxation of regulation allowed for office spaces to be turned into refugee accommodation, which paved the way for the project piloted by Marie-Therese Harnoncourt-Fuchs (see above). Much attention has thus been given to the abundant unused office space in many European cities; Stefan Rettich writes that “the volume of vacant office space in major German cities […] is particularly high in tight housing markets. In Frankfurt alone, it amounts to 1.4 million square meters. In urban planning terms, this roughly adds up to a potential 20,000 apartments in integrated urban locations.” [12]
Increased regulatory flexibility is required to provide cities with the means to respond to demographic shocks with resilience, rapidity, and efficiency, while ensuring they maintain an affordable housing offer, a condition for urban attractiveness. In the coming months, our working group will further explore the topic of evolutive housing and the transformation of short-term accommodation into long-term housing. The group will also continue to explore the various leads which stakeholders may pursue to further improve the quality of temporary accommodation and transform the place of temporary housing in cities.
Improving the quality and image of temporary housing and designing temporary housing for all
In line with this choice of focus, the group has already begun to examine the ways in which innovation in the field of temporary housing can provide residents with greater intimacy, adaptability, and autonomy, bearing in mind that quality temporary accommodation can work towards the goal of integration of refugees and of affordable housing.
For instance, the fact that an individual will only be inhabiting premises for a short amount of time should not have to mean that they must remain captive of a standardized environment over which they have no control. How can they be given the possibility to actively shape and influence their living arrangements?
A first lead for achieving greater autonomy is the provision of paths towards rapid formation and transformation of living arrangements through self-building, furniture building, or the cultivation of vegetable gardens. Autonomy through self-building should be encouraged by pointing refugees (and, in fact, whomever might want to build temporary shelter) to the resources required to pursue it. This may be achieved, for instance, through the use of a mobile app (particularly as it is well-known that an overwhelming majority of refugees is equipped with smartphones) that would point users to the locations where the necessary material can be found for self-building, which can help refugees appropriate their new surroundings, effectively becoming city-makers considered by others as contributors to the city rather than just benefitting from urban resources. Accordingly, the UNESCO writes that “complementary to codified human rights that establish city-dwellers’ access to urban resources, the right to the city entails the mutual process of shaping oneself and the city”[13]. In a similar vein, the Federal German Chamber of Architects recommends enabling “personal contributions”:
“Standard final completion (eg carpets, floor coverings) does not have to be undertaken by the landlord. It can instead be left to tenants, so that it meets their own particular requirements. On the one hand this leads to a reduction in costs, and on the other, tenants identify more strongly with their own four walls, as was the case with displaced persons in post-war Germany.”
The need for intimacy, another prime preoccupation for newly-arrived refugees, should inform the design of temporary housing solutions. While certain types of spaces can easily be common (kitchens), others, such as bedrooms, familial living rooms, and bathrooms, are by necessity intimate spaces that refugees cannot afford to share with one another. The need for intimacy does not prescribe a given form of housing nor does it preclude the invention of innovative solutions, as evidenced by the project carried by the next ENTERprise in cooperation with Caritas, “HAWI — Experimental living”, where young refugees and students were each given the components required to assemble an individual “room-in-room module” in which they might isolate themselves by closing off screens.
Finally, the working group has highlighted the necessity for temporary housing to prove adaptable. We too often tend to consider a refugee’s personal situation at the time of their arrival as fixed, forgetting that personal situations may evolve considerably in mere months, with marriages and childbirths suddenly rendering former living arrangements inadequate. By stabilizing the temporary, cities can offer refugees the possibility to remain in the same space regardless of any potential changes in their personal situation.
What necessary follows is that housing must adapt to these changes, an imperative addressed, inter alia, by modular housing. The need for additional space brought on by the birth of a child or the arrival of a relative or new roommate can be met directly by the use of an incremental, modular system whereby a plot’s inhabitants may opt to build the new space or room they deem appropriate based on their needs. The success of modular approaches of this kind was recently demonstrated by the Kassel project spearheaded by German architecture firm foundation 5+, which designed 36 modular apartments for 182 refugees, with an average surface area of 9.7m2 per person; the project stands out in its additional plan to transform these modular apartments into student apartments or social housing in the longer term.
Fostering networks of cities to co-construct resilience
Certain cities have reacted to the influx of refugees by hiding these new populations from sight, fearing that these new arrivals would lead to unrest or upheaval among their inhabitants. Consequently, these cities have tended not to publicize the initiatives they have implemented in order to welcome and integrate refugees. This strategy plays a part in sustaining negative, fantasized representations of refugees by discouraging encounters between the two populations.
Yet cities have much to gain not only from publicizing these initiatives, but also from sharing experiences, successes, and failures with other cities, through the creation of networks aimed at exchanging best practices. Indeed, most of the resources needed to change perceptions of refugees and promote better integration into their cities of arrival already exist but are insufficiently known, especially when they have arisen out of the civic sphere. Cities could collect and store information related to these initiatives in a database that would allow local public authorities to grasp the full extent of the resources their territory may offer refugees and consequently to share ideas and best practices with other cities.
In a spontaneously collaborative approach, some have created networks fostering urban cooperation and discussion on the most successful resilience strategies. The British network City of Sanctuary offers a prime example of this, with 40 local councils coming together to facilitate the placement of refugees in local homes. Meanwhile, newly-created Solidarity Cities, the brainchild of Athens’s mayor and the Eurocities network, aims to facilitate exchanges of information between its member cities regarding the refugee situation and to foster technical and financial help between cities. While these are highly commendable initiatives, cities should also strive to look beyond the specifics of the current refugee situation in order to conduct a more general examination of the resilience strategies implemented by their counterparts throughout the world in response to diverse demographic shocks as is done, for instance, by the 100 Resilient Cities network.
Empowering European cities to help them handle the demographic shock as successfully as they can is an urgent necessity, but also offers longer-term benefits: the lessons learned from this specific situation will no doubt apply in the future, as cities will certainly have to contend with influxes of climate refugees in the coming decades. As for the near future, one can only believe, and hope, that cities succeed where states have largely failed since the onset of this migratory wave: in turning crisis into opportunity.
[1] “Arriving on the Edge: Migrant Districts and the Architecture of Inclusion”, Doug Saunders, in “Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country”, German Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition 2016 — La Biennale di Venezia, Peter Cachola Schmal, Oliver Elser, Anna Scheuermann (Eds.), Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Something Fantastic, Hatje Cantz.
[2] Ibid.
[3] “The Arrival City and the Integration of Migrants”, Jürgen Friedrichs, in “Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country”, German Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition 2016 — La Biennale di Venezia, Peter Cachola Schmal, Oliver Elser, Anna Scheuermann (Eds.), Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Something Fantastic, Hatje Cantz.
[4] “The Role of Cities in Immigrant Integration », Brian Ray, Migration Policy Institute, 1 October 2003, http://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/role-cities-immigrant-integration
[5] “Arriving on the Edge: Migrant Districts and the Architecture of Inclusion”, Doug Saunders, in “Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country”, German Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition 2016 — La Biennale di Venezia, Peter Cachola Schmal, Oliver Elser, Anna Scheuermann (Eds.), Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Something Fantastic, Hatje Cantz.
[6] “Affordable Housing for All”, Federal Chamber of German Architects, Position Paper, 11 February 2016
[7] This, despite positive average housing availability levels in European countries: “Many countries in the region have a surplus of housing. For example, close to 1 million dwellings in the eastern part of Germany, extensively renovated after unification, are vacant. Neighbourhood upgrading programmes in some countries are demolishing unoccupied or unpopular housing, for instance in the Netherlands, Denmark and the United Kingdom. Part of the mismatch is related to migration, especially the deficit of affordable housing in high growth urban areas.” (Source: “Housing affordability & segregation — Europe and Northeast Asia”, International Federation for Housing and Planning, July 2016, http://www.ifhp.org/sites/default/files/staff/affordability_and_segregation_one.pdf)
[8] “Cash-strapped cities, don’t seek private cash — sweat your own assets”, Dag Detter and Stefan Fölster, The Guardian, 9 January 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/public-leaders-network/2017/jan/09/cash-strapped-cities-private-public-assets
[9] See, for example : “In order to mobilise additional land for building, especially in inner-city areas, a usage category for residential use in the vicinity of businesses that cause disturbance is required. This type of area could fill the gap between residential use in mixed areas (MI — where residential use and businesses that do not cause disturbance are both permitted and have equal weighting) and commercial areas (GE — residential use only permitted in exceptional cases, and if it is associated with, but subordinate to, the commercial use.)” (“Affordable Housing For All”, Federal Chamber of German Architects, Position Paper, 11 February 2016)
[10] “Affordable Housing for All”, Federal Chamber of German Architects, Position Paper, 11 February 2016
[11] “Housing affordability & segregation — Europe and Northeast Asia”, International Federation for Housing and Planning, July 2016, http://www.ifhp.org/sites/default/files/staff/affordability_and_segregation_one.pdf
[12] “Regulate, Reduce, Accelerate”, Stefan Rettich in in “Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country”, German Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition 2016 — La Biennale di Venezia, Peter Cachola Schmal, Oliver Elser, Anna Scheuermann (Eds.), Deutsches Architekturmuseum, Something Fantastic, Hatje Cantz.
[13] “Cities Welcoming Refugees and Migrants — Enhancing effective urban governance in an age of migration”, Inclusive and Sustainable CITIES series, under the direction of Golda El-Khoury, UNESCO, 2016 http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002465/246558e.pdf
La Fabrique de la Cité is a think tank on urban transitions and innovations. Find out more about our work here.
This article is part of La Fabrique de la Cité’s current research project, “From Asylum-Seeking to City-Making: Asylum-Seekers and Refugees in European Cities.”
