The street as a public space in the workers’ colony and its impact on the ghetto-type community

Abstract

“Any education is self-education, and we, as teachers and educators, actually create only the context in which the child self-educates. We must achieve the optimal context, so that, through us, the child can be educated on his own, just as he must be educated through his own inner destiny.” Rudolf Steiner – philosopher, pedagogue, architect.

Suburban areas are the most important areas for the future development of cities, but also in here we can find the highest level of poverty. Thus, we can say that the development of cities and communities in the suburbs are influenced by poverty. Therefore, it is essential to develop sustainable strategies, taking into account the dominant factor as poverty. Suburban neighborhoods are the poorest, often compared to ghettos. The paper analyzes the context of architecture dedicated to this community with a specific atmosphere and identity.

In this context, the author developed the project "Community Center" [1] for the diploma project in 2018, which aimed to study and propose architectural solutions for the community in the working district Kuncz, so as to develop and increase the quality of life in a troubled community. This project was very much based on the street space - the street house - because the people in the neighborhood spend a lot of time on the street, the street representing their house, as well as architectural proposals and solutions, but did not address the public space - the street itself - with which was closely related.

Thus, in this project, the author will evaluate and analyze the working colony, the historical, anthropological, urban and social evolution, as well as the current needs of the community, how it came to become a working class neighborhood from a working colony, and finally, we will propose a solution to revitalize the development strategies for  these communities. The strategies will be proposed on the working colonies under discussion, but they can also be proposed for similar communities, in the current social context, which can be taken over and implemented in other working communities.

As an example, in the current context of the COVID-19 pandemic, in these communities people live in droves, in very small spaces - the Kuncz case. Often families, in which three or four generations live together, have only a room or two. Apart from a few public fountains on the streets, they have no running water or sewerage. They are therefore ideal conditions for the spread of COVID-19 infections. In these conditions, how necessary and urgent is the public space for them? How important is a public space in this community? What does a public space mean to them?

The proposed strategy will reveal the needs of the community, after identifying the problems, and will propose current, modern, alternative, economic and social solutions to the current trend of marginalization, distancing and dispersal of communities.