Urban pop-up housing environments and their potential as local innovation systems

Cities are increasingly facing the difficult task of providing their residents with a high-quality living environment while at the same time responding to the increasing demand for housing in a sustainable urban environment. Temporary housing solutions represent one possible approach to quickly increase residential densification by adapting areas often not considered in conventional residential housing. However, this is currently a little investigated and discussed topic in strategic urban development.

In this interdisciplinary research project, framework conditions and specific concepts for sustainable temporary housing solutions were developed and analysed as a basis for integration into future urban planning strategies. Such temporary solutions should be able to be easily and quickly implemented into temporarily unused spaces of an urban environment. In addition, they should be of high quality and largely oriented towards the requirements of ecological and social sustainability and be affordable. The research in this project consequently focused on the three elements: people, area, and housing type.

The starting point was a comprehensive literature research on international temporary housing examples from which a data pool of more than 100 examples was collected. Subsequently, basic characteristics and principles regarding the three research elements were derived. Based on this, specific user profiles for temporary housing needs were created, area and housing types were systematised and these were put into context in the form of six scenarios for the city of Vienna. The scenarios include housing models for urban vacant lots, empty factory buildings and inner-city retail premises as well as water areas and disused railway tracks. Temporary alternative housings, which can be placed at short notice at cooler areas in the city in summer and inhabited by vulnerable groups of people for a few weeks, were also modelled for the periods of heat waves that are expected to increase in the city in the future. A special focus was placed on the possibility of new forms of social interaction and experimentation in order to use the temporary housing models as innovation niches.

The temporary housing models were examined for their ecological and social sustainability as well as site and technical aspects with the participation of various scientific disciplines and external stakeholders. For this purpose, a comprehensive evaluation concept was developed, which enables an interdisciplinary assessment of temporary forms of housing also for future planning projects and strategic developments. Likewise, spatial framework conditions were developed and mapped in a specially elaborated tool based on a geographical information system. Key aspects regarding environmental impacts that emerged from the assessment include the sustainable use of existing brownfield sites and the use of demountable modules and materials that allow for as many high-quality reuse cycles as possible.

So far, the topic of temporary housing solutions has hardly been addressed in strategic urban planning in Vienna. Therefore, clear organisational and legal framework conditions are needed to implement temporary housing solutions in a targeted manner and with regard to sustainable space and resource requirements in order to cover possible acute demands that may arise from unexpected and unforeseeable events. The results of the project provide a scientific and evidence based foundation to initiate this discourse and contribute to the development of strategic framework conditions for temporary housing in Vienna.