Home Silk Road - Housing toward empowerment

The Home Silk Road project aims to change the housing paradigm by placing immediately vulnerable groups at the heart of the city, while demonstrating how they can bring societal and economic value to their district. 

The project will function as a lab gathering housing and non-housing business partners together with residents, in order to:

• Leverage the renovation of a central and emblematic building of the local silk industry history to provide diverse housing solutions by 2023 for vulnerable groups (single-parent families, students, migrants, etc.) along with services that foster individual initiatives (incubators, third places)
• Create an innovative model of temporary housing providing a home for 30 vulnerable families on the construction site, immediately from the 1st phase of construction works. They will benefit from specific support fostering integration both in their housing and the neighbourhood, and from employment opportunities and activities generated by the worksite (e.g. Community restaurant) 
• Create a local culture that recycles worksite wastes and rehabilitates demolition resources in a way that decreases the housing carbon footprint (circular economy activities reusing material from the construction site for practical or artistic purposes)
• Develop an integrated worksite taking advantage of the residents and users consultations as part of a participatory process to prepare the integration of the definitive housing solution on the site. This will include leveraging the human and building material resources available onsite through the creation of economic and cultural activities focusing on the potential of residents and the site renewal.