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

The need for temporary housing particularly in urban environments is expected to increase dramatically. To address these urgent demands, it is important to find affordable and flexible but sustainable and reusable concepts that are easy to construct and rapid to implement. However, to go one step further, temporary housing will be conceptualized as local innovation systems. In this respect, this project focuses on an inter- and trans-disciplinary approach to systematically investigate and evaluate existing temporary housing options, and to create holistic, innovative and sustainable models for pop-up living systems in urban environments. Methods from urban and landscape planning, architecture and building systems technologies are interlinked to resource related disciplines such as energy optimization, green technologies, sustainable waste management, water supply and wastewater treatment as well as social and political sciences. Diverse modelling approaches are integrated into a cross-disciplinary model and subsequent scenarios of pop-up housing environments are developed for different target groups and types of urban spaces. Risk assessment approaches as well as energy and life-cycle-assessments are applied to evaluate the housing models. This research clearly goes beyond state-of-the-art, since for the first time a systemic modelling approach is applied to develop high-quality and sustainable temporary housing environments as innovation niches within urban systems.

Our Vision: 

We critically reflect our own subject-specific approach with an open mind and will consequently research urban systems in a comprehensive holistic and interdisciplinary manner by integrating the aspects of people, housing and area.

We contribute to the development of sustainable and resilient urban living environments by innovatively merging our scientific methods in order to prepare the ground for temporary housing concepts and solutions as local innovation systems.

Project Partners:

This project is funded by Vienna Science and Technology Fund

for more details: https://www.wwtf.at/index.php?lang=EN