Abstract
The urban growth in the second half of the 20th century was largely characterized by the construction of new housing areas to accommodate working force of the fast-growing production facilities. A common planning approach in Europe to provide housing was the construction of comprehensively planned neighborhoods of mid to higher densities which provided all necessary daily amenities within one's immediate living environment. Today these types of urban environments which take a rather large portion of cities' suburbs are aged up and in a need of comprehensive regeneration including physical and functional upgrading, not only to provide better quality of life but also to address the current environmental challenges such as resource efficiency, climate change adaptation, stresses resilience and growing social gaps. Even if it is clear that these kinds of environments have to adapt to the new social, economic and environmental realities of current times and despite some systematic approaches to regeneration of large housing estates through top-down policies, the aged-up housing estates remain the sick men of many contemporary cities, which highlights at least a partial unsuccessfulness of existing approaches. Based on the selected case studies from Slovenia, this paper firstly describes the state of the art of aged up large housing estates by focusing on their resource inefficiency in terms of daily-errands mobility, food flows and thermal comfort regulation. It problematizes the absence or low efficiency as well as incomplete top-down policies that aim to improve their living standard and resource efficiency. The second part of the paper sets up the conceptual framework to provide a possible new approach that would link the spatial, social and economic assets of the neighborhoods through identification of the key local resources for the sustainable transformation. It is based on the basic premises that the successful neighborhood regeneration must foremost be grounded on revealing the persistent ways of life that determine the specific socio-economic and spatial structures, and which are reflected through the spontaneous evolution of the initial morphotypes that were conceived decades ago in very much different socio-economic and environmental realities and have then after developed, transformed and been upgraded according to the needs of the residents as well as outer forces. The third part of the paper gives some recommendations on ensuring the consistent evolutionary growth of the communities with the persistent way of life within the aged suburban settings by evolutionary transformations of prevailing urban morphotypes. The recommendations include the briefs for the development of urban-planning, financial and managerial policies for launching and implementation of context-based urban regeneration approach taking into account the persistent way of life, as a novel approach to achieving a more resource efficient future of this densely populated and thus environmentally burdensome type of urban environments.
