Urban Fragments as a Base of Integrated Living

Abstract

Integrated housing has its own long history presented through different types of forms of collective housing in reference to the historical, cultural and social context. To understand the human needs related to housing in present day or for the future, with the expansion of the heterogenic way of living, we have to understand the life style. “Urban fragments as a base of integrated living” is researching urban fragments from different eras of the history of the city of Skopje, and at the same time are the city’s expressions. The mutual differences of the urban fragments are perceived as a foundation for various forms of integrated living, as a type of generative base of a new housing picture of multitude. The purpose of this research is triple. First to present the process of change in the Skopje housing areas to be transformed or erased as a documentation plan. Second to show the typo-morphological plan of hypothetical possibilities of their transformations, through research of the projects. Third, to give specific methods of the research plan of the contemporary spatial phenomena. Local tactics of connecting contemporary and traditional patterns of housing are presented on the level of urban fragments, through selected scenarios of urban transformation, where architecture is infrastructure, architecture is territory, architecture is stratification. Through the local tactics of stratification, metamorphosis, cross-section, sequential connection and implantation, a new way of generating local collective form of integrated living is presented. This new way is not coming in the order up – down and is supporting and stimulating people’s everyday practices. In this sense, the promoted proto-typology is a form of defining new specific spatial and program housing configurations of integrated life styles.