Can architecture help to resolve the emerging crises linked to climate change, loneliness and housing in Norwegian towns and cities? On its own, perhaps not, but housing arrangements that promote public health and inclusion appear to be profitable.
When residents and developers plan in unison, the likelihood of the emergence of innovative and more eco-friendly housing increases. This is the conclusion arrived at by SINTEF and Bergen municipality after testing some new approaches to urban development.
Our dream was to develop a new and easy-to-use digital tool similar to Tinder or AirBnB that enables future housing owners seeking innovative sharing arrangements to meet architects and developers before new housing is designed and built.
Who wants to explore new ways of living?
Bergen was the first municipality in Norway to appoint its own city architect tasked with promoting quality in the built environment. As part of a research project called Bopilot, the city wanted to:
- contribute to more innovation and diversity in the housing sector
- promote knowledge of, and interest in, alternative housing options
- demonstrate to developers that there is a market for alternative models and homes involving shared space and use arrangements.
“We wanted to demonstrate how architecture and the way we build can together act as tools for the creation of sustainable communities”, says Tina Larsen, who is a senior architect at the municipal consultancy unit Byarkitekten and Project Manager of the project Bopilot Bergen.
A full-scale model of the interior of a shared housing arrangement, taken from the exposition ‘NABO’, held at the KODE art gallery in Bergen. Architects: Helen & Hard. Photo courtesy of Tina Larsen, City Architect at Bergen municipality.
Yes! – to bringing families with children into city centres and promoting a diversity of communities
The urban district of Grønneviken in Bergen is growing apace, and Bergen municipality has two objectives for its development. The first is to make it attractive to families with children to live in the town centre, and the second to build homes and neighbourhoods offering a diversity of shared housing arrangements.
Potential residents, housing developers and architects were invited to take part in a variety of project activities designed to enable researchers and the municipality to generate enthusiasm for new housing models, both within the municipality itself, and in the housing market.
“Our hypothesis has been that in their different ways the various activities can help to promote change and innovation”, says Senior Research Scientist Karin Høyland at SINTEF.
“We wanted to find out who was interested in shared housing arrangements, as well as what it was specifically they wanted to share. We also wanted to see specific solutions implemented in Grønneviken”, says Tina Larsen.
Digital participation was employed to get an idea of the willingness for shared arrangements and to get in touch with residents who wanted to take part in further activities.
It emerged that many home buyers were interested and came with a variety of motivations for wanting to share. Some groups exhibited a greater interest than others.
We wanted to demonstrate how architecture and the way we build can together act as tools for the creation of sustainable communities.
“Singles and couples with children who have moved away from home are the group most positive to alternative living arrangements, while families with children living outside the city centres are the least interested”, says Larsen.
Those who had shown interest for shared housing arrangements were invited to take part in a so-called design sprint. This is a method by which participants define their needs and make and test solution prototypes as the project progresses. Cross-disciplinary groups were assigned to develop new spatial solutions involving community housing and sharing arrangements.
Facts about the Bopilot project:
The innovation project called ‘The municipality as a driver for alternative housing arrangements’, also known as ‘Bopilot’, involved SINTEF and NTNU working together with Bergen and Trondheim municipalities in a joint effort to test new housing solutions and forms of collaboration. The project ran from 2018 to 2022 and was funded by the Research Council of Norway. Professor Eli Støa from NTNU’s Department of Architecture and Planning acted as Project Manager.
Click here to read more about the project (in Norwegian) https://www.ntnu.no/ad/forskning/bopilot
It quickly became clear that architectural solutions are key if this approach is to work, although this is not the main factor influencing the building of shared housing options. Issues such as municipal bureaucracy, as well as legal and financial factors, are equally challenging.
Developers must recognise the potential
Activities linked to the Bopilot project revealed that it is essential to demonstrate to developers that there is a demand in the market.
“Only when developers recognise that a market exists will they make the leap and start thinking about non-traditional housing concepts”, says Tina Larsen.
The early involvement of potential residents, right from the concept stage, can help to lower the threshold for considering alternative housing options involving sharing arrangements.
Collaboration at an early phase is also important for enabling future residents to establish a sense of belonging and confidence in each other, as well as influence over housing design. It also helps to show developers that there is a willingness in the market for innovative housing options.
This is why Bergen municipality arranged a so-called hackathon, involving a 24-hour brainstorming competition aimed at creating a forum for all those looking to explore new ways of building and living.
“Our dream was to develop a new and easy-to-use digital tool similar to Tinder or AirBnB that enables future housing owners seeking innovative sharing arrangements to meet architects and developers before new housing is designed and built”, says Larsen.
A total of 32 teams from all across Norway took part in the online hackathon event. The winners were the firms Sweco and 3rw arkitekter, which are currently working to develop a platform called Samdelt. The most recent status is that they are in the process of completing a business plan and are looking for business partners, including UX designers and programmers.
Talk about architecture!
The Bopilot project was concluded with the housing exposition ‘NABO’ (How shall we live together?), which was held at the art gallery KODE in Bergen. The expo included a full-scale model of a shared housing unit designed by the architects Helen & Hard (see the photo earlier in this article).
The model was taken directly from the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and was the result of interviews with residents in the housing co-operative Vindmøllebakken in Stavanger. The expo gave the general public the opportunity to share in the day-to-day lives of residents in a housing collective and to see what the Vindmøllebakken residents would have shared if they had strived to achieve even more than they are currently doing in the co-operative today.
The Bølgen housing co-operative – a real success story
The Bopilot project activities have enabled Bergen municipality to get in touch with a group calling themselves ‘Bølgen’. These are a group of friends forming an aspirational senior collective who want to live together in their old age. They want to establish a co-operative offering private housing units with access to shared communal areas where they can cook their meals, eat and socialise.
Ever since 2015, the group has been in dialogue with a number of developers trying to get their dream housing project built, but has encountered much resistance in the form of complex planning bureaucracy and a lack of willingness on the part of developers to take any risks.
The design sprint exercise used in the Bopilot project enabled the group to get in contact with the Bergen and district housing association, also known as ‘BOB’. BOB has since succeeded in redesigning what was an ‘ordinary’ housing project to create a town house complex, called Delegården, offering shared housing arrangements and communal areas.
The Bølgen group has provided input to the design and is currently assessing, in collaboration with BOB, whether it can function as a housing collective for the members of the group.
The Delegården project was also exhibited at the NABO expo.
“The expo offered an opportunity to give the architects a push and get them to show people something before projects were approved. It also enabled them to receive specific feedback from the public, which they could use in their further work”, says Larsen.
The expo organiser also challenged the developers to highlight how the public could get in touch with them in order to influence outcomes and provide feedback on design-related issues. The Delegården project (see the fact box) won the public’s prize and a place at the Oslo Architecture Triennale expo, where it drew a lot of attention.
A number of ‘neighbour evening’ events were also held at which residents, developers, the municipality, politicians and architects were given the opportunity to discuss both specific topics and projects, as well as issues such as social diversity, shared housing arrangements, housing quality and neighbourhoods. The architects taking part reported that they had expanded their understanding of how what they create impacts on people’s everyday lives.
A total of 560 school pupils visited the expo as part of a so-called ‘Cultural School Bag’ event. With the help of some architecture students, they were given the opportunity to make their own architectural models and to provide the municipality with input as to what communal spaces they would like to see in the urban districts of the future.
Participation in the various activities shows that there is a lot of enthusiasm for neighbourhood communities and architecture. Twenty thousand people visited the expo, and more than 1,000 participated in the ‘neighbourhood evening’ events.
“We’re not really surprised to see these levels of enthusiasm”, says Tina Larsen. “This is a trend. People are genuinely interested in design, the home and architecture. And the Covid pandemic has aroused awareness of loneliness and sharing arrangements”, she says.
Good architecture is not only about visual impression, but also function. It is much easier to achieve innovation in housing when architects communicate more with residents. By revealing both opportunity and potential conflicts at an early stage, we will ultimately identify better solutions.
Connecting residents with developers
In the course of the Bopilot project, the municipality was contacted by many residents looking for housing projects offering shared arrangements and communal options. Many were looking for a more social way of living and were simply wondering where they had to go to find the right project.
“This has led us to believe that there is a need for a new role in the city administration – a form of ‘housing liaison office’ that can assist residents and developers who want to live or build in new ways, to find each other”, says Larsen.
Four pieces of advice to other municipalities
Based on the processes carried out during the course of the Bopilot project, researchers can now offer the following four pieces of advice to other municipalities:
- Put the significance of housing for sustainable community development on the agenda.
- Establish commitment in the municipality to the need for changes in housing development policy.
- Provide someone with a clear mandate to act as a driver to implement such policies and identify relevant roles.
- Employ pilot projects as change agents.
All the reports from the Bopilot project can be downloaded free of charge from the Byarkitekten website.
- Kommunen som pådriver for alternative boligløsninger. Rapport fra forskningsprosjektet Bopilot. (The municipality as a driver for alternative housing arrangements. Report from the research project Bopilot, in Norwegian)
- Click here to read more about the NABO expo held at the KODE art gallery in Bergen (in Norwegian).
