Sustainable Living Spaces

Short description of the future field

Sustainable Living Spaces belongs to the new future fields, which have been elaborated within the Foresight-Process as focal issues in future research activities. Interviews with experts at home and abroad as well as an online survey and bibliometric investigations led to the following definition and delineation:

Definition and Delineation

The living spaces of the future will be different in terms of its structure and or-ganisation. Driven by the reorganisation of ways of life and technological pos-sibilities, chronological and spatial residential and living patterns are changing. Together with demands for sustainable spatial development, these changes re-quire innovation and adaption in various research topics.
To be able to react to continuing social trends in the long term, it is necessary to make settlement-structural concepts more dynamic to better manage changing basic conditions, establishing flexible and environmentally-friendly spatial and settlement structures, for example. Efforts to meet these demands, which are still in flux, are obstructed by today's settlements and infrastructures, which can only be changed at a high cost and expenditure of resources in the short to medium term. Infrastructures for energy supply, for facilitating transport and for providing and disposing of water or water-related services through to the guaranteed supply of information and communications, must therefore be made more flexible at the technical level. The possibility of reconstruction or dismantling must be taken into account in their implementation.

Sustainable settlement development also requires different planning and »gov-ernance« structures specifically targeted at integrated infrastructure manage-ment and the greater significance of the built environment's life cycles. Actors' structures and new forms of cooperation play an important role in implementing and establishing sustainable settlement and service concepts, not just in technical infrastructure but in social services.

Well-coordinated efforts by actors in various research areas will in future be ne-cessary for operations in this area of tension. Potential structural and technical innovations will emerge that cannot be foreseen today. Firstly however, a fundamental understanding of complex connections is necessary. The vital role of the state in developing and building up large new infrastructures must also not be neglected.

More on this topic

Report

The complete chapter on this new future field from the Foresight report is available for download here.

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