Finland is internationally recognized for its considerable efforts in reducing chronic homelessness trough the Housing First service model. Unfortunately, Housing First doesn’t cover everyone and the services outside of it face a lack of priority.
A nonchronically homeless person is generally placed into temporary housing services. Finnish municipalities are obligated by law to provide but not to produce the service, resulting in increasing privatization and risking the long-term availability. While their owned and operated temporary housing services lack in space, municipalities keep selling empty social and healthcare properties like healthcare centers, unused due to centralization.
But what if they could be reimagined as the much-needed temporary housing instead? The projects looks at opposing the rezoning of social and healthcare properties as a possibility to realize this question.
The definition of temporary housing as a transitory service creates a unique opportunity to place it into a social and healthcare property without changing the zoning. With the service placed as the primary use, secondary commercial or cultural uses can be introduced within the zoning, making the properties financially operational and so questioning the need for their zoning to be altered.
The presented building is a former mental hospital rethought as temporary housing coexisting with spaces for community, cultural and well-being use. It shows an alternative to the planned rezoning, refusing the loss of these spaces of care and bringing agency to the citizens. Rethink, don’t rezone.
