Vertical Village : towards a new typology of high-density low-income urban housing

Abstract

Apocalyptic global urbanization is old news. For generations statistically supported oracles have warned against the rising tide of rapid urban growth, one must only casually search the keywords "urban slum" on Goggle to witness the physical manifestation of these abstract predictions across the world. One would expect that with such continuous and advanced warning the landscape of global low-income urban architecture would be highlighted with innovative approaches to housing our ever densifying urban populations. However contemporary high-density low-income housing projects largely continue to rely on post-war modern architectural paradigms that view the creation of high-density low-income housing in isolation avoiding the messiness of a diverse social, environmental, infrastructural and economic context. Future typologies of high-density low-income housing must embrace and re-imagine their relativity within larger urban ecologies and in the process develop as responsive multi-cellular organisms, as opposed to autonomous products. This is not a new or novel idea, finding its roots in village models as early as the 14th century. The foundational components of communal living have not changed significantly in the last 800 years, remaining concretized in the defensibility, production and sociability of the collective. It is the aim of this body of research to elaborate and expose the 21st century high-density low-income urban village and to three-dimensionally assemble its components into intelligent and evocative discourse.