habitat4all offers an integrated approach for low to medium-income neighborhood planning and development.
Urban context
Most states have in place a variety of urban development and
social housing programs in order to meet the growing demands of
their lower-income citizens. Such social housing programs present
numerous challenges, the following being amongst the most
relevant:
Demand for social housing outpaces supply of new homes due to
net demographic growth, migratory flows within and between
countries and increasing household incomes.
Traditional construction technologies are slow to deliver homes
(eg. between 2 and 3 years to execute a housing project for 300
homes)
Limited availability of targeted funding (public and private) for
social housing, hinders massive programs.
Urban development for low-income neighborhoods is often not
planned to include all relevant infrastructure needs: (eg. access,
green spaces, energy, transport, health, education, leisure,
religious, security) creating new low quality environments.
Housing programs are seldom self-sustaining (they depend too
often on public funding, discourage household responsibility and
often don´t include social integration and economic empowerment
programs under public-private partnerships).
Land speculation and scarcity of land tends to favor middle-to-high
income home development against low-income housing projects.
A new urban development and social housing paradigm
Carefully designed integration between different uses of space and resources (eg. housing, retail, green spaces, accesses,
environment and social programs infrastructure as educational,
health, cultural, etc.)
Specific design options for each of the above activities.
Program evaluation techniques for different urban design
options against multiple objectives measured by appropriate
key performance indicators (eg. Economic-financial,
environmental – eg. energy, noise levels,, green space - ,
habitat quality, safety, congestion, community integration)
Coordination with government authorities, business and
technology alliances as well as NGOs for social programs
integration, under public-partnership alliances.