Integrating refugees in shrinking cities through adaptative reuse: architectural principles for refugee housing projects

Abstract

In the current European context, characterised by an already tight housing market, finding adequate affordable housing to ensure successful integration for a growing influx of refugees is a major challenge. Consequently, refugees often end up settling in excluded and deprived urban areas, thus hindering integration. While capitals and major European cities feature affordable housing shortages, there is a significant number of homes and buildings sitting empty across Europe, with a high proportion located in shrinking cities. Thanks to the high number of vacant buildings, this study argues that small and mid-sized cities facing population and economic decline represent a unique opportunity to successfully integrate refugees in well-rooted mixed-use neighbourhoods through the adaptive re-use of abandoned buildings. This paper critically examines the principles that the interventions for the inclusion of refugees in shrinking cities should follow at both, the urban and the architectural scale, in order to achieve a more cost-efficient integration while contributing to community and urban resilience. Through the review of secondary sources and the analysis of four refugee housing examples, this research determines requirements that a shrinking city needs to fulfil in order to enable the physical, economic and social integration of refugees and asylum seekers. Secondly, it will introduce some of the architectural principles that could be applied for future projects of adaptive re-use to maximise its positive effects on urban refugee integration processes.