NOMAD · Nomad MAnagement of Urban Development. The complex value of temporary communities

Nomad MAnagement of Urban Development. The complex value of temporary communities

The project NOMAD Nomad Management of Urban Development - The complex value of temporary communities has explored the value of temporary uses and the role of urban nomads in urban regeneration and placemaking. In Europe, more than 11 million dwellings are unoccupied. There is a lack of affordable space for housing and workplaces, while cities have many vacant spaces, representing a significant potential for new uses and activities. There are a lot of houses without people and people without houses, especially in some Mediterranean countries. From the 1970s to now, the squat, anti-squat and various co-management forms of housing occupation movements have represented a strong space demand. Young people, activists or creatives claim space and experiment with co-managed and innovative forms of living and working together. Temporary communities represent the urgent need for the right to the city. They inhabit spaces for a temporary time span, usually for low rents, and generate value through active use and management, but eventually have to move if higher rents can be achieved or the space will be redeveloped. After realising temporary commons, community members become urban nomads, voluntarily or not. Urban nomads are composed of diverse social categories: young and adults, students and workers, residents, immigrants or homeless. They activate new social dynamics inside and outside a temporary use, test real estate adaptations, and very active communities improve neighbourhood liveability providing services, attracting new activities, improving street safety, and, thus, activating processes able to boost the real estate value in the long term. Because of increased real estate and land values, the temporary users who co-produced the increased value have to move and start again in often precarious conditions. This is the paradox that this research will focus on. In this European context, although temporary uses have been recognized as a powerful tool to experiment with new uses and develop sustainable practices and generate different kinds of values for people, real estate and the neighbourhood, the complex values that they co-create and co-produce are not evident in real estate (e)valuation practices and have been partially captured in urban studies. Examples of vacant spaces are vacant former office buildings, houses disposed of by housing association portfolios, buildings waiting to be demolished, public abandoned buildings or buildings in retail areas that lack a financially feasible business model for commercial parties. Based on this hypothesis, NOMAD explored: Which values do temporary use(r)s co-create and co-produce for vacant buildings and their neighbourhoods? How can we measure them?

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз