Changing styles of housing area design 1970s to 1990s

We can now see from an extensive body of research that the missing concept for the planners and designers of the time was that the outdoor spaces needed to provide local people not only with facilities, but also with a range of experiences, that is, to provide satisfactory settings for daily life in the home environment. (Summary of relevant research: Beer,1990 and 2000.) The author fears that if the buildings that are going up at present are a guide, this concept is still missed by too many of today's designers as well.

By the end of the 1960s and into the early 1970s, at a time when the first research evidence of the failure of many high density housing designs was being published, a new issue came to dominate the site layout and detailed design ideas of architects, landscape architects and planners and determined the decision-making behaviour of many of them: an increasing awareness of the need to integrate natural habitats into housing areas. This concept diverted attention from the much more complex problems of the role of the external spaces being thrown up by sociological studies. Instead of addressing the problems of how to design the outdoor spaces holistically in relation to the full range of experiential needs of local people, these designers focused attention on one particular aspect of the human experience - contact with nature - a vitally important element of an individual's experience of daily life, although not the only one.

In the Netherlands and Scandinavia the 'nature in the city' concept grew in strength from the late 1960s to the 1980s. It had a major impact on the way the external spaces of high density housing areas were designed and how the landscape that resulted was managed. Nature was integrated into high density, high-rise schemes such as the Bijlmer, Amsterdam and Beethovenlaan, Delft -ARB check places and get photos. That this approach also failed to produce residential environments which the inhabitants found satisfactory, we can now see was unsurprising: - the planners and designers still neglected to cater for the ordinary every day human experiences - they did not ask the question 'what is it like to live in this house/block and move to it and from it?'

By the late 1970s the fashion for high density, high-rise housing schemes with large areas of open and greenspace was over. Planners' and designers' efforts were diverted into low-rise, middle density housing. Family housing with gardens became the vogue in western Europe. The problem now became one of keeping any open space at all in the new developments - many were produced by private developers who were loathe to take on the added burden of providing open space accessible to the general public. The result of this changing agenda was that the problems of the high-rise estates were forgotten; they are indeed very different from those associated with the sea of low-rise, middle density housing which became the common form of housing until very recent times.

Source: http://www.thesteelvalleyproject.info/green/Places/residential/high-rise.htm