Lack of affordable housing, social segregation and loneliness are just some of the challenges of urbanization. There’s a need for affordable housing that unites the industrialized construction with architectural qualities that promote social well-being and social interaction between different demographic groups.

Juul Frost Architects designed Better Affordable Housing to create good settings for a thriving and informal neighbourhood. With the residents’ interaction in mind, the individual building is predisposed toward situations where inhabitants can come into contact with each other. In Better Affordable Housing, it is the choreographic features – the paths and entrance bridges – motivate the social interaction between the inhabitants.

Better Affordable Housing has been developed with combinatorics as a principle. The variation in the apartment sizes based on the flexible construction system engenders a basis for a diversity in the demo-graphic composition of the residents: a residential area that can accommodate singles, couples, elderly people, newly established families and students flat-sharing. The social diversity in the residential composition in Better Affordable Housing, moreover, was supported by mixed modes of owner-ship in a single building complex.

In the case of Better Affordable Housing, however, the situation of being tripped up economically was transformed into a creative catalyst. The construction price of Better Affordable Housing corresponded to half the construction price of a public housing unit / non-profit housing, thus the project showed new ways to link affordable housing with the promotion of social interaction between different demographic groups. As Carsten Thau, Professor, History of Ideas once said about the project: “…the relation between the buildings invites the inhabitants to spontaneously meet one another, once they come home from work and fall into conversation.”