Living in Intensive Urban Structures

As a result of changes in the society, such as the increasing mobility, increasing spatial demandindgness of inhabitants and the onset of digital technologies, the architects and urbanists have been searching for new ways of urban housing developments. One of these ways is densification, i.e. an intensive use of the urban space. An intensive urban structure uses up the potential of a place to its maximum, solves several issues simultaneously and is a functional hybrid, the home of potential suburbanizers and a place of social contacts. It comes from the efforts to solve the particular issue of an over-populated, collapsing city. The aim of the thesis is to show contemporary approaches to the issue of intensive urban structures and to map out both the built and unbuilt projects. The thesis creates a system of their categorization and taxonomy. There is always a mixture of functions in play from the functional perspective. One can distinguish five categories according to the spacial conception. These categories are as follows: multiplicity, porousness, hybridity, connectivity and verticality. The public and semi-public spaces thus move to the higher levels of the city, into the city level, urban balcony or the hybrid landscape. The built projects usually tend to be impulses, in relation to the original city, to develop and revitalize the devastated city areas, brownfields, even urban sprawls. Based on the findings of this thesis, diploma and pre-diploma project assignments have been created at the architecture department at FAST VUT in Brno and the approaches to the issue have been tested in the pedagogical process. The survey in the second part of the thesis looks for the answer to the question of whether the potential inhabitants of an intensive urban structure exist, and who these people might be