Re-Imagining the Million Programme : Strategies to Increase Flexibility in Existing Multi-Family Housing

Abstract: Housing has always been an urgent question in modern times: how to provide for increasing demand and quickly changing patterns of living. One of the main issues with it is that the very people who will buy, rent and use housing have mostly have little or no say in the design— or how they would like the house to change over time. One of the most audacious experiments in modern housing, the Swedish Million Programme, is over 50 years old; these estates are ageing and have become misaligned with modern ways of living, rendering them susceptible to segregated neighbourhoods and neglect, and out of date in terms of energy use. While a new housing shortage looms, the renovations to million program buildings could potentially provide some insights into the housing problem. The ageing infrastructure of the million programme is an opportunity to reconsider the way we think of housing today. The million programme was scientifically designed and constructed with state-of-the-art methods in the 60s and 70s, and was an example to the world. Today, the buildings are not up to environmental standards and need refurbishment to improve thermal performance. Also: the particular family sizes that the estates were designed for some decades ago, do not exist in the same proportions today. There is not as much diversity in sizes and types of apartments as are required for today’s different and unpredictable demographic changes. This project proposes a system of extensions to the facades of the buildings that challenge the existing plans and allows newer typologies to be remade from the old buildings. This would necessarily require the participation, conversation and negotiation of the residents, as well as facilitating agencies like the Kommun, Housing companies, Tenants’ Associations, Manufacturers, Construction companies and so on. Residents have been the most marginalised group of all the parties who come together to make housing; I contend that this is one of the fundamental issues of all housing that are designed with little adaptability and hence are dated with a fixed lifespan, after which changing lives begin to make them redundant. However, a user-driven process and designs that afford adaptation according to changing needs may allow housing to have an inherently longer life, and affect the social cohesion and sense of place of the city as well. The method is to test architectural strategies to a building of the million programme
in Umeå, to bring out potentials and possibilities of participation in such a context. The main strategy is a Support and Infill model of incremental addition: the design of fixed infrastructure and of potential changes that may be added onto it. Speculating possible configurations of addition may provide some insight about the benefits and pitfalls of such and similar systems of refurbishment, and of participation. Perhaps a built environment that is able to change more easily to accommodate people’s changing lives and needs over time produces more energetic, active and livable cities that are more resilient to change and unpredictability that is characteristic of our world today.