Reimagining the Housing Landscape: Research-by-Design for Housing Young People Experiencing Homelessness in Groningen

The approach to homelessness in the Netherlands is currently undergoing a paradigm shift, moving away from shelter-based systems toward direct and unconditional housing, as articulated in the National Action Plan on Homelessness Eerst een Thuis. However, the regular housing supply often fails to meet the diverse needs of young people experiencing homelessness, whose situations are shaped by high stress levels, instability, and frequently trauma. This research explores how alternative housing concepts can better respond to these needs by focusing on the hardware dimension of housing design—its spatial, material, and architectural qualities.
Existing initiatives to enrich housing concepts for people experiencing homelessness tend to focus mainly on the software aspects of community living, emphasizing social cohesion, collective activities, and supportive networks. This paper complements and challenges that emphasis by foregrounding the need for imaginative hardware interventions—architectural, spatial, and material solutions that can meaningfully expand the architectural repertoire of youth housing, and better respond to the needs of the diverse group of young people facing homelessness.
Conducted within the Master of Architecture programme and the Real Estate Professorship of the NoorderRuimte Research Center at the Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, the study was grounded in a participatory design process involving students, researchers, local stakeholders and experts by experience. The insights and lived experiences of young people served as the starting point, ensuring that their needs and various profiles informed all stages of the design exploration. The theoretical framework combines principles of healing architecture and trauma-informed design, acknowledging that experiences of homelessness often go hand in hand with elevated stress and trauma, and that the built environment can play an active role in fostering safety, autonomy, and wellbeing.
The research-by-design process resulted in a wide spectrum of creative spatial directions aimed at enriching the current housing landscape. These directions range from acupunctural interventions within existing social housing stock, to reinterpretations of historical urban typologies such as the hofjes, to integrated design strategies embedded within broader transition agendas like climate adaptation. Other explorations focus on design processes that create opportunities for ownership, agency, and active participation by young people throughout construction.
To sum up, these design outcomes propose new ways to enhance destigmatisation, social cohesion, empowerment and personal development for young people facing homelessness in Groningen, while contributing to a more diverse and imaginative Dutch housing landscape.