A Sustainable Urban Concept for Housing Estates: Plot, Patch, Part

Abstract

While, in practice, the rehabilitation of prefabricated housing estates has mostly focused on the buildings, a comprehensive concept, which is able to revalorise this problematic housing stock has become increasingly relevant. The specific, holistic proposal of the revalorisation demands an interdisciplinary approach, based on urban planning principles of SUN (sustainable urban neighbourhoods), that can reconceptualise housing units on the different scales as plot, patch and part of a city or town. To find proper methodology, this paper attempts to adopt an approved evaluation tool used in the field of property development. Property development strongly adheres to various certification systems. These apply not only to buildings, but on the urban scale, neighbourhoods can also achieve good qualification in systems like LEED Neighbourhood. This study argues that the requirements of LEED Neighbourhood can be adequately applied in the case of existing housing estates; as a result of which, they could become less isolated and could be more easily integrated into the neighbouring urban network as sustainable parts of cities and towns.