What’s Next for Mom and Dad’s House?

Proposing solutions for how the traditional suburban single-family house can be reinvented for the contemporary market and climate

Despite the increasing interest in reuse and circularity, little attention has been paid to the task of transforming the extensive residential sprawls of single-family houses built across the Western world in the second half of the 20th century. Yet changing demographics, socioeconomic transformations, shifts in housing preferences and the attractiveness of the city as a productive space have exposed the financial, material and cultural crises facing these settlements. In light of such trends and given the sheer size of the phenomenon, retrofitting the single-family housing stock to make it more consistent with socioeconomic changes can be regarded as one of the most urgent, unresolved issues in architecture and urban design today. This book investigates the potential inherent in transforming the single-family house in different geographical contexts by a group of emerging and established scholars from the US, Europe and Australia.