Agriculture as a Catalyst for New Forms of Urban Habitat in Residential Architecture. A Case of Multi-Family and Mixed Housing Estates from 2010–2021 – European, American and Asian Context

Abstract

The article presented herein constitutes a research summary on urban, residential housing forms connected with agriculture developed in the years 2010–2021 throughout Northern America, Asia and Europe. The presented research was aimed at a comprehensive and comparative analysis of contemporary architecture, concerning new spatial phenomenon, analysing both the external form and the internal structure – formal and functional, of the resulting housing development. The method of global sampling was chosen as the possible examples of housing estates related to greenery or agriculture are spread worldwide. The paper aims to identify the main trends in creating a new form of urban living and to find the main points generating changes in the structure of buildings in connection with urban agriculture. Seven case studies were selected for the study, relating to both conceptual and already completed projects, showing a number of differences between the theoretical approach and its implementation, both in terms of the adopted assumptions and parameters of the obtained space in relation to housing estates combining architecture and greenery from that period. Case studies from Asia, North America and Europe created a background for comparison with the first Polish example of this type of development, located in Poznań.

Keywords

• housing development
• urban agriculture
• multi-functionality
• urban farming
• multi-family housing