Do public housing companies design our cities like large houses and our houses like small cities?

摘要

Public housing companies that are linked to local governments built entirely new streets and even neighbourhoods, and at the same time the houses in those streets. They operate on the scale of the city, and at the same time on the scale of the house. Comparing their guidelines for the design of the street with their guidelines for the design of a house, lets us verify if these commissioners, that set an example, do consider the city as a large house and the house as a small city.A first reading of both sets of guidelines of such a housing company brings up astonishing few parallels. There seems to be almost no identical use of vocabulary. Before reading through the guidelines for a second time, we define ‘scalesynonyms’, as words that identify comparable architectural elements, but on different scales. Like the bedrooms being the private spaces on the scale of the house, are comparable to the houses themselves as the private spaces on the scale of the neighbourhood. Scalesynonyms can be defined for almost all architectural themes, using scale scale independant descriptions such as context, detail, threshold, place, poché, servant and served, also materialisation, flexibility and compactness.Comparing these ‘scalesynonyms’ in a second reading, shows already many similarities. The finding of these similarities between house and street confirms the importance of the involved guidelines. In practice, using these ‘scalesynonyms’ could make it possible for users to look at the involved guidelines from an extra viewpoint; new for one scale, but already familiar on another. This familiarity on another scale confirms the guideline. And from research about learning processes, we know that new viewpoints on topics can help in a better understanding. But the comparison of ‘scalesynonyms’ on the scale of the street and the scale of the house, also brings up some differences. In the guidelines of the public housing company, some aspects only get attention on one of both scales. And some aspects that get full attention on one scale with very specific guidelines not to be mistaken, only come as ‘might be better’ on the other scale. Or even get no attention. These differences bring up interesting questions. What are possible reasons for the differences? And what if we would eliminate these differences and really design our city like a large house and our houses like small cities?