Back to rural: Rethinking suburban housing

Sammanfattning

It is known by everyone that the migration to urban areas is increasing. But what about ruralmigration? While ongoing trends such as globalization or urbanization led people to live inurban areas, for many people they are the reasons to get away from urban areas. Decreasingliving standards in urban areas, the desire to be closer to nature to get away from noise andpollution, or remote-work opportunity can be counted among the reasons.Many Swedish suburbs and rural areas are receiving migrations. Population growth is projectedfor many low-populated areas, especially the ones close to the cities. Due to this development,there are new housing projects in these locations. The housing plot sizes for low-populatedareas are traditionally around 800-1800 sqm in Sweden. By reducing this size, the natural areacan be saved, and the future expansion of the built area can be slower. This thesis focuses onprojects which include many houses in the project area, and discusses how the housing densitycan be increased. This way, more houses can fit in the same project plot to save nature.By increasing the number of houses for the same project plot, houses will be closer to eachother. This threatens the privacy of the users. Privacy is one of the important housing qualitiesfor people who want to move to a low-populated area. Also, to support immigration to lowpopulatedareas, there must be suitable houses for everybody, not only for families but alsofor single-person, youth and the elderly. The users should be able to reorganize the interiors astheir wish. Therefore, flexibility is another important quality of this design project. Due to thesemain goals, the design question is:What are the potentials to build dense dwelling areas andat the same time improve privacy and flexible space for residents?One of the ongoing projects located in the municipality of Borås is chosen to discuss how topropose more housing units for the same plot area, but still provide privacy and flexibility inthe houses. Two projects are proposed for this area. In the first design proposal, the housingdensity increases by 50% (14 units to 21 units), this project is proposed as a housing project forthe rural area. For the second design proposal, the housing density increases by 100% (14 unitsto 28 units). This project is more experimental to show how it would be if the density is doubledand proposed as a suburban housing project. But also would be implemented in the chosenrural area due to many reasons.