The Primacy of Residential Quality in Urban Creation. A Current Observation on a Recurring Notion

Journal article, 2013

As a current observation this contribution intends to situate origins of the notion of the primacy of residential quality in urban creation in a historical context before May ’68 and to show the relevance and actuality of this concept in emerging contemporary projective urban architectural practices. This is done through a retrospective re-reading of a major research contribution of architectural residential sociology elaborated by Henri Raymond and his team of ISU directed by Henri Lefebvre. A summary of results were published in 1966 as l’Habitat pavillonnaire and re-published in 2001 with the three different components together with the never published applied methodological instruction for inquiries of deep interviews with residents in suburban single family urban zones. This groundbreaking qualitative interpretive approach in social sciences with repercussions in residential architectural design orientations is regarded by the author as a still valid example of how social sciences can provide a more profound understanding of residents’ perceptions of their spatio-social residential situation, hábitat y habitar, than what the standard survey can offer for design guidance.