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Former industrial workers‘ settlements define the Ruhrgebiet to this day. Despite the structural change the Ruhrgebiet is facing, they have not transformed or adapted to contemporary living and working conditions. Due to digitalisation and globalisation, the otherwise protected domestic sphere is increasingly becoming an improvised workplace. It is necessary to tackle these challenges by retrofitting former workers‘ settlements in a way that goes beyond mere housing or workplace design. Bissingheim is a former railway settlement built in the middle of the First World War. It was from a period when the newly established factories had disintegrated the workplace from the living space. Although it was designed around the Garden city concept, public green spaces became neglected, and Bissingheim developed into a mono-functional residential neighbourhood. Due to the lack of new impulses and newcomers, residents grow older and get excluded from social life while the population became homogeneous. Through theoretical research about the notions of work and a carefully conducted structural analysis and its interpretation, an architectural intervention was conceptualised. The project aims to create neighbourhoods that allow different living situations and create spaces to nourish exchange and plurality between generations, through densification, heterogenisation, and reappropriation of green space by presenting two strategies. While the first strategy creates new housing offers and is a source of income for the residents, the second strategy foresees the implementation of different working spaces that turn the settlement into a diversified Garden City. A symbiosis of living and working environments is invented, whilst a common ground between private spaces and public areas is established. It creates a blueprint for quality of life where people in different phases of life share knowledge and experiences.

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This master dissertation project started from a personal concern about my own living environment. For nearly 20 years I have been living in a suburban neighbourhood located in the Northern edge of Ghent. My neighbourhood is part of a typical post-war development where the rural lands changed, after the Seventies, at high speed into residential neighbourhoods for young families. In 2002, when my family moved into this neighbourhood, these young families had already turned into older households. Over the years, the proportion of older people became larger and larger. As a younger person, I never thought about the impact of the neighbourhoods’ condition on aging. I always felt that these people are lucky to grow old in such a nice and quiet green neighbourhood. However, as a child I experienced in a limited way what the older residents are going through. I grew up very comfortable in this quiet neighbourhood, but at the same time this quietness felt isolating. My whole childhood I had to rely on my parents and their car to get me around. This often kept me from getting outside and at times created a sense of exclusion and isolation. The moment I made this reflection at a later age, I realized that I am lucky that I had someone to rely on at that time. For a lot of older people in these neighbourhoods this is not the case making their once ideal living environment an obstacle today. Knowing my neighbourhood is only a small fraction of the Flemish suburban territory and the aging population in these neighbourhoods continues to rise, made me aware of the big challenge Flanders is facing. This personal concern marked the start of my master’s dissertation. Aging is a global problem. Policy makers saw aging coming from a distance, but nothing was prepared. In the early 1990s, care for older people exclusively involved residential care, the so-called residential care centres. However, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed what 40 years of abandonment in eldercare lead to in these centres. There is a shortage in healthcare facilities and the average age continues to rise. Just because the aging population keeps increasing, doesn’t mean the short-comes are going to keep growing. At least not if we start looking for the solution somewhere else. Because of the aging population and the corresponding healthcare short-comes, the government’s existing welfare vision stimulates Aging in Place. This simply means aging in your own house and relying on your own environment and social network. Since the Flemish are ‘born with a brick in their stomach’ and are often unwilling to move, especially people over the age of 65, this system has the potential to be a great alternative for the residential centres. However this care model can only work if the conditions are favourable. This is often not the case in suburban settlements where the greatest aging takes place and the need for care is greatest. Car independence, lack of community facilities, cause older people to be distant from social and physical care. Currently, eldercare policy is the exclusive responsibility of the Department of Welfare and Health at a regional level, while it is also primarily a question of spatial planning, housing and social networks. How can retrofitting the suburban settlement lead to a new care model while dealing at the same time with its fragility of change? How can the introduction of shared spaces led to a new social and care network? Can thinking beyond the borders of suburban prope

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This project addresses the challenge of the lack of local food production in urban territories. It points out the hazards as well as the environmental, economic and social problems caused by externalized and globalized food production. The thesis describes the reality of the situation in Polish cities. It analyses the urban agriculture movement and shows theoretical, historical and current examples of attempts to introduce food production in the cities. The project of this work is an intervention in the Polish settlement in Wrocław - Sępolno, which was built according to the principles of Garden City. The thesis analyses the context of Wrocław and proposes an organizational and architectural strategy for the introduction of agricultural cooperatives in neglected or disused areas and privately managed gardens. The aim of the intervention is to ensure at least partial food self-sufficiency, to improve the quality of space, the environment, the social life of the settlement and health of the inhabitants. The architectural intervention is a redesign of the outdoor space and the provision of communal space with small architecture and amenities as well as a building that fulfils residential, social and storage functions.

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Garages are often underestimated spaces, that take over a large part of suburban context, however, do not receive enough attention. Designed for automobile, but perfectly suitable for adaptation, garages retreat as an extra room within the house – biggest storage space, hobby room, workplace etc. As suburbs are usually for the one and only purpose - living, garages are important as a place of invention where productive and reproductive activities take place, however hidden and in isolation. Garages initially were not meant to be inside the structure of home, but now is in front of the house, working as a buffer separating living spaces from the street. Garages symbolize individualization and isolation, however with opening its doors for longer time, the same space invites for social interactions. Thesis project sees a potential of garages in the context of social housing that is driven by idea of private property. Selected site is car-based suburban social housing neighbourhood Ravensteinwijk (Tervuren) with typologies of semi-detached single-family houses with garages on the ground floor. As there is a big need of smaller or bigger units, existing building typologies currently support only one model - nuclear family. In addition to that, social dimension of neighborhood is lost, and garage now is a buffer that increases privacy. Garage becomes a center to re-think typologies. Thesis project challenges social housing by expanding garage. It becomes a new core of the house and extends towards outside in a form of a platform. With this strategy overall transformation of housing typologies is being enabled and neighborhood is diversified with new models of living. Instead of inventing new, project improves existing architectural qualities and strengthens uses that are already desired in the space of garage, however not in isolation, but shifts towards more collective model. As project is challenging the usability of garage, it makes its climatic characteristics pleasant throughout all the season. Lastly, by working with garage project also re-addresses street life as well, by allowing social interactions through garage door– extension of the street life to the inside and vice versa.

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For some, a relic of the past, a redundant place, not fitting into the landscape of a modern metropolis and opposing the investment needs of urban areas; for others – an element of new urban development based on the principles of sustainability, urban agriculture and care for biodiversity. A substitute for a home in the countryside, away from the hustle and bustle of the city and other people, or a shared space to build local communities. Abandoned, overgrown and in a way absorbed by nature, while next door – shining with newness, with a house from a catalogue and Pinterest and breaking price records on classifieds portals. Places to meet, get active, relax and take care of a piece of land for the elderly, or a weekend getaway for employees of global corporations and the metropolitan creative class – with broadband wifi, trampolines and extra parking for hybrid SUVs. The allotments are impossible to pass by indifferently. Subjected to many contradictory and mutually exclusive social, economic and cultural processes of both global and local character, they have recently – after years of oblivion, sometimes suppression – returned to public debate. One of the groups interested in them are artists, there are innovative concepts of their use, searches for appropriate legal solutions and new functions for them in the era of (post)pandemics, climate change or the housing crisis. The work tries to enter these discussions and looks for communal possibilities of functioning of todays allotment gardens in the urban context, rejecting at the same time easy solutions and stereotypical views – those romanticising allotment gardens, as well as those in the spirit of their gentrification. Community is understood here not so much as an end state, a postulated local community, but as an open, inclusive form of sharing and living in a given space with other people but also with non-human entities – alongside them, alternating with them, together. Using the example of the Królikarnia allotment cluster in Warsaw, the project explores ways of facilitating access to such places so that they can constitute an alternative form of social care by redistributing plots, retrofitting the spatial model and supplementing it with common parts. The work examines the layered privileged access, structural problems and socio-cultural changes described. On this basis, it seeks to propose the overall scenario for the redistribution of allotments begins with determining who can “enter” allotment gardens and under what conditions. The spatial proposals at each of the scales of edge operations suggest that the space concerned is subject to constant negotiation, particularly going down to the scale of the “single” plot, and access to it is in fact determined by its users through their use. The edge is seen here not as a barrier that is fixed but as a tool for neighbours negotiations. Proposals postulated in the project, such as sharing a common plot of land, are not utopian ideas, harmonious constructions of new or deconstruction of existing systems. On the contrary, as I show, the plot of land sometimes becomes a kind of platform for confrontation, an arena for conflicts which, being an inextricable part of every community’s life, play an important role in its creation. Like the “Tango” project that I refer to in the study, the whole process is characterised by slowness and repetitions of the movements and like in every dance there is always a risk of treading on someone’s