This research addresses the rising amount of homelessness in Rotterdam. Homelessness should be prevented in an early stage to avoid long term health issues. Home-seeking youth fall between the cracks of the system since there is a lack of social support for those between 18-23 years old with no official care indication. Because of this, It is hard for these youth to build a healthy future. The term “home-seeking youth” is used to reduce stigma on homelessness and emphasize their quest for stable housing.

The needs of home-seeking youth are explored in this study, which also considers ideas on how residential housing concepts can effectively address these needs. Research will be conducted through field research involving interviews with professionals, workshops with long-term homeless individuals, and workshops with vulnerable youth in Rotterdam to understand their housing needs and preferences.

The aim is to determine how a residential building can support the physical (socioeconomic security), mental (empowerment), and social (inclusion and cohesion) needs of youth seeking stable housing. Among these needs, social needs seem to play the most important role as they form a safety net for both mental and physical needs. The main need that home-seeking youth have is for a relationship with someone who can offer them unconditional support. Therefore, it is important that housing for youth includes access to an adult who can help them informally.

Independent (i.e. single) mothers are stuck in a trifold of problems regarding housing, resources and labour after divorce, separation or unwedded childbirth. The lack of adequate permanent one-parent family housing puts them in a vicious circle of structural disadvantage. The inequality of opportunity has long term effects on the mother's sense of self, her parenting style and the opportunities for her child(ren), who is more susceptible to end up with the same problems.

This thesis is an exploration into the socio-spatial housing needs of independent mothers and to what extent collective living arrangements could provide an opportunity to balance work and family life effectively, through redefining traditional household structures. Through the lens of second wave feminist theory, the nuclear family is deconstructed, and the concept of collectivised household labour is explored. Drawing examples from other forms of non-nuclear households, including matriarchal tribes, self-work hotels, and eco-communities, the benefits of shared responsibilities of social support systems and efficiency are remarked. This theoretical study is juxtaposed against the practical research, consisting of interviews with assistance professionals, architects and empirical experts, from which a tight balance between community and privacy becomes significant. Thus, it is concluded that collective living arrangements have the possibility to empower independent mothers by expanding the meaning of a household, through dispersing the workload and sharing among each other. However, it remains important to realise that sustainable and supportive communities require room for the individual, like-minded people, rules and work for it to be effective. Collectivised household labour exists within a trade-off between radical intervention and practicality.

Overall, this research aims to contribute to the discourse on housing design by advocating for imaginations that empower, instead of stigmatizing and incorporating the voices of the people you are designing for.

Aligning the urban environment to concrete urban processes, increasing the liveability, is one of the major challenges urban planners are facing. Adapting the built-environment to cope with soil sealing, climate change, the densification of cities with the ‘compact city’ concept and other urban demands, constantly pressure the quality of urban environment. Being part of the Dutch building culture for centuries, urban domestic gardens have played a significant (spatial) role in Dutch cities, taking up a significant part of the urban environment, and providing a private outdoor space for residents. The ongoing urban processes can or will affect the role urban domestic gardens play and how they are being used or implemented into the urban environment. For this research, the neighbourhood the Tarwewijk in Rotterdam has been used to investigate and explore how urban domestic gardens can contribute to a more liveable urban environment through a sustainable urban regeneration, in response to concrete urban demands. The research shows that rethinking the implementation of urban domestic gardens leads to an increase of the liveability in the Tarwewijk, by using specific, transferable values to improve the quality of the public spaces and buildings. Transferring the values related to eating, learning, working, playing and meeting from the social environment, and greening, cooling and infiltrating from the physical environment into public spaces increase the accessibility to values of gardens, without the need to provide urban domestic gardens to every single household, taking up valuable space in existing cities. It also shows that the regeneration of urban domestic gardens to semi-private shared gardens serve as a mechanism for the densification and diversification of the built environment, improving urban structures and physical forms, with related social processes and liveability.