Building for Resiliance

In our discussion about politics in architecture, we have talked a lot about issues such as gentrification.  This act of going through and "cleaning" up areas, and in the meantime also pushing out lower income individuals who are often times left with nowhere to go.  This makes me think back a few weeks to a previous discussion about the idea of resiliency in architecture, or the act of building for adaptability.  Could that perhaps be a step in the right direction for relieving some of the effect of gentrification in the future?  I think we will all argue that there will come a time that a building must either be torn down, retrofitted/repurposed, or repairs must be done.  In our last section of the class, we talked about how, depending on the project or specific piece of architecture, the answer to what of those things should be done could vary.  But what if we built things to have the ability to adapt?  Could that help prevent areas from becoming "run down" and likewise minimize the invasivness of "cleaning up" an area? In reality, I am not sure if gentrification is a problem that we will ever be able to come up with a true solution to, but perhaps there are steps we can take in the future to help minimize the scale in which it occurs.


Here are some examples of adaptive reuse projects: