Building Design Strategies to Facilitate Social Integration Apropos of International Examples

Text: Tibor Tánczos

Discussion with the prospective residents in front of the construction-ready Brazilian house

More and more people realize that helping those who live on the margins of society is not only a question of ethics and virtue today. As the social and political burden of massive impoverishment, indebtedness and the loss of homes is on the increase, the interdependence of various social strata becomes more and more obvious and perceptible as our common interests and intertwining fates are inevitable. In order to change this situation, the role of architects is to be revised, amongst others. According to architectural approaches analysed in this survey, the main causes of poverty are not material factors or insufficient infrastructure, but the deficiencies of education, organisation and the lack of relations and nexus capital. These strategies make advantage of the fact that social problems are more efficiently tackled as embedded in the context of relations, neighbourhoods and friendship than amongst conditions of extreme social separation. Examples analysed below feature various continents and yet each of them reflects the significance of certain aspects such as cost-efficient construction, maintenance and operation, whilst the development of communities during the creation of the building and throughout the utilization of the realized man-made environment are also key factors contributing to them.