Norra Tornen: Making exclusive living inclusive

Sammanfattning: Today our city cores are being transformed. Not only have they been transformed from a place of production to a place of consumption, but more recently also the city core as a place of work are being challenged by increasing land prices and the desire to live centrally and urban. An urban lifestyle has in some ways become an exclusive benefit for the most wealthy, and the tall residential towers symbolizes this new urban, transnational elite, that wants the qualities of a living city center but prefers to live high up in the sky. Though this elite sometimes never lives there, since they only see the apartments as investments, as a “money deposit”. These buildings increase gentrification and segregation since they push up the housing prices of the city cores and provide no public functions, we get excluding cities rather than including. In my thesis project I speculate how we can prevent our city centers from becoming an excluding and exclusive gated community, and I develop a general redesign strategy for the exclusive residential tower typology. I have searched for a collective rather than individualistic approach, that considers both environmental and social sustainability.