Nature based solutions promoting social sustainability

5 January 2023

Solution provider

Juul Frost Architects is an award-winning multidisciplinary studio with a holistic approach and a human focus. The purpose of our architecture and urban development is to promote quality of life, health and well-being.

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Challenge

With the increasing urbanization, the design of our cities, public spaces and built environment will have a greater impact on our well-being as well as our health cultures: how we live our lives, our behavior, and the choices we make. Social segregation, growing loneliness among urban dweller and lack of identification and belonging are just few of the challenges to our social well-being resulting from urbanization.

Juul Frost Architects approach secures all residents access to nature and recreational spaces that promotes out-door communities and invites to social and physical activity. Visualization from Juul Frost Architects’ 1st prize in the open architectural competition for Arena Park, Samara (2020).

Solution

From physical to social design

We tackle prevailing societal and social challenges through a consistent focus on social sustainability on all scales of urban development from planning and landscaping to the design of dwellings.

With a hierarchy of green and urban, public and semi-public spaces across, urban development we develop compact, pedestrian friendly, mixed-use quarters with identifiable local areas, that foster the social sustainability and -cohesion.

Our design of green cities, urban spaces and residential building have a consistent focus on:

Daily social meetings between neighbors and residents;
Communal spaces promoting local communities on different scales;
Social diversity across age, income etc.;
Safety and security;
and sense of belonging, that address the human need for attachment

The landscape as the social enabler

We take a starting point in the landscape and draw the local nature into the urban fabric across all scales. With the landscape as the structuring element, we secure an urban development that promotes social sustainability on various scales, through:

Urban nature as a social link on city / quarter scale.
Social networks of green passages, pocket parks and -squares on neighborhood scale.
Green semi-public courtyards on block scale.

Concept and plan from Juul Frost Architects’ 1st prize in the open architectural competition for Arena Park, Samara (2020).

Result

Our approach draws nature into the urban fabric and turns the climate challenges into social potentials: Nature based solution work as climate adaption and secures a residential area resilient towards the changing climate and cloudbursts. The water sensitive design of the landscape accentuates the rainwater and provides the basis for biodiversity as well as a lush green common zone: It provides all the residents with access to nature and recreational spaces that promotes out-door communities and invites to social- and physical activity.

Juul Frost Architects approach has, among other things, resulted in first prize in the open architectural competition for Arena Park in Samara.

To emphasize the urban nature as a social link green areas are programmed and integrated with major public functions and community services.