Improving the Quality of Suburban Building Stock

Suburban building estates make up more than 50% of all European building stock. For each country, this represents a substantial fraction of the total value of the housing stock. These urban areas are primarily residential and are home to a large part of the population. Beyond differences in the ways in which governments have handled the development and transformation of the cities and the land, the common characteristic of all suburban areas – and in particular those suburbs of medium to large cities – is lower quality of life; and in many cases, widespread social unrest. The book collect the first result of a COST Action research which seeks to address the improvement of the building performance, social benefits and urban value of suburban post-war dwellings, promoting specific sustainable refurbishment strategies. Compared with other programs, this research aims to be innovative in promoting changes to the traditional large-scale approach to building refurbishment that generally doesn’t achieve the expected results in terms of costs, management and market impact. To do this a set of specialized tools and methods can be used individually for specific interventions, or together if more extensive refurbishment action is required. The multifunctional renovation approach is based and examined on representative case studies selected from a significant sample among the participating countries. A further input, for a holistic approach to the assessment and improvement of quality in the suburban areas, comes from the contribution of other research groups which are working on specific topics that may be considered part of an extensive concept of building quality. This book includes several contributions from other COST Actions working in the Scientific Domain TUD (Transport and Urban Development) that have been selected for information exchanges and for the development of a collaborative work on the comparison and dissemination of results achieved.