In the Netherlands, almost everyone has an image of 1930s neighborhoods, post-war neighborhoods, and Vinex locations. That is very different for the neighborhoods with social housing apartments from the 1970s and 1980s. They are forgotten, hardly known, even professionally. And that is a problem because a wave of restructuring and densification projects is imminent for these areas. They are related to the post-war neighborhoods, but also have fundamentally different spatial characteristics. Moreover, within the fragmented practice of spatial development, there is little shared knowledge on plans in other municipalities or housing associations. Even less is known whether these neighborhoods offer space for tackling the persistent housing shortage and solving other major social challenges, such as energy, biodiversity, circularity and inclusion. It is time for an inventory, and this project undertakes the challenge.

In the planning for these residential areas, municipalities, developers and housing corporations set the framework, but it is the urban development and architecture firms that have to translate this into concrete design solutions. We focus on these SMEs. With this research project, we map out the ambitions, challenges and opportunities of the restructuring of these residential areas in three steps: What type of plans and ambitions are there for these residential areas? To this end, we investigate cases by means of policy analyses of the environmental visions and area visions. What characterizes the spatial-social structure of these neighborhoods? To this end, we make a comparative spatial-social analysis of several cases, also in relation to pre-war and early post-war ones. What opportunities and challenges does their restructuring offer? To this end, we use the acquired insights to explore strategies in co-creation sessions with external partners. In this presentation, we will share some of the outputs of this process.