Quartiersbezogene Wohnformen für Menschen mit Pflege- und Betreuungsbedarf : Untersuchungen zur Wirksamkeit adaptiver Gebäudekonzepte am Beispiel von Großwohnungen für Wohngemeinschaften

• Neighbourhood-based forms of housing for people with care and support needs : investigations into the effectiveness of adaptive building concepts using the example of large flats for residential communities

Eiden, Carsten; Schneider, Hartwig (Thesis advisor); Förster, Agnes (Thesis advisor)

Aachen : RWTH Aachen University (2022)
Dissertation / PhD Thesis

Dissertation, Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, 2022

Abstract

Neighbourhood-based forms of housing are intended for people who rely on support in the form of nursing and care services or assistance in their everyday lives. Their outpatient care concept is to be viewed as an alternative model to traditional institutional care, as it detaches the home from the required services thus providing greater freedom of choice. The socially and structurally integrated residential units of neighbourhood-based forms of housing allow their residents to lead a largely independent life within their own homes, irrespective of their personal care needs. What is currently available is not fit for purpose. Furthermore, it is foreseeable that demographic change and the fundamental right to participation in society, which also implies the freedom to exercise choice in one's own housing situation, will increase the demand for suitable housing units manifold in the next decade. Thus, the task of construction is gaining a high social relevance. The reasons for the sluggish expansion of neighbourhood-based forms of housing are many and varied, because as a complex system they depend on the cooperation of different protagonists in order to ensure not only integration into the neighbourhood but also connection with the services of professional service providers. Although the much-needed alliance of housing and social economy has been sufficiently tried and tested, it is still far from being established as a planning standard in all areas. At the same time, this housing model results in altered requirements in housing construction that go beyond the concept of accessibility and thus determine the key question of this thesis. What are the factors of structural inclusiveness in housing construction and what structural order does the building need so as to be capable of adapting to the changing needs of the users in the long term as well as being sustainable in terms of supply security? A particular challenge emerges in the construction and provision of large flats for residential communities with care services, which require a living space of approximately four hundred square metres and are, nonetheless, to be structurally integrated into mixed-generational house communities. The central part of my dissertation is devoted to this form of housing on the levels of function and constructive implementation. By means of graphic studies, the requirements as well as the spatial and functional relationships of the residential community are first examined in order to derive arrangement and adaptivity principles. The main section concludes with studies of the building structure, in which the immanent connection between structure and adaptivity within the task of construction is clearly illustrated.