© EFFEKT
Children’s Living Places
Initiated by SOS Children’s Villages Denmark, Children’s Living Places will house children displaced by the war in Ukraine. It comprises three clusters of low-carbon, healthy homes, where children will live with foster families, receive psychosocial support and have access to shared recreational spaces.
Learn more about the work of SOS Children’s Villages.
Ukraine has one of the highest rates of children living in institutional care in Europe and the war has damaged or destroyed more than 10% of the housing stock.
Children’s Living Places serves as a lighthouse project, showing how to combine social sustainability principles with low-carbon housing design. The project aims to create a better alternative to what was available before the war. The long-term goal is to provide better care for children lacking parental support and to deinstitutionalise childcare using holistic solutions.
Play
Responsibility to rebuild more sustainably
In the coming years, Ukraine faces a huge task to rebuild the country. In doing so, it is important to pursue healthy and sustainable housing solutions right from the start. This requires using the highest quality and most sustainable building materials and standards available.
The VELUX Group is contributing to the rebuilding of Ukraine through Living Places. This healthy, sustainable and scalable housing concept can help rebuild the country in a way that will benefit both the people and climate in the Ukraine.
VELUX is proud to partner with SOS Children’s Villages Denmark and share our knowledge about affordable, sustainable, and liveable buildings through our Living Places concept.
The Living Places concept shows how existing materials, techniques and technologies can be used to build homes of the future that have a three times lower CO2 footprint than standard newly built homes in Denmark and a first-class indoor climate.
Watch VELUX CEO Lars Petersson share his thoughts about Children’s Living Places.
Play
Sharing the Benefits of Living Places
The buildings in the Children’s Living Places project as well as the living space layout will be designed following the five key principles of the Living Places concept: that homes should be healthy, adaptive, simple, shared over time, and scalable. The concept has been scaled and adapted to fit the needs of the project and the local context in Ukraine to ensure that the new homes for the foster children will have an improved indoor climate and low CO2 footprint.
Watch the video to understand how the Living Places concept is helping SOS Children’s Villages Ukraine.
Living Places Principles
Healthy principle
Benefiting both people and planet, through the careful selection of materials, building techniques, utilities, and design configuration of indoor and outdoor spaces.
Shared principle
Strengthening the sense of community by combining private dwellings with shared spaces, resources, outdoor areas, and amenities.
Simple principle
Offering a simple modular building system that requires little to no maintenance and can easily be upgraded, repaired and fitted with smart appliances.
Adaptive principle
Creating a scalable solution that responds to the needs for more ways of living.
Scalable principle
By creating homes that challenge the way we design, plan, and finance homes we can unlock housing for the many.
Coming Together
The VELUX Group is supporting the Children’s Living Places project as a part of a broad coalition of partners from the building industry. As part of our support, The VELUX Group has entered an agreement with SOS Children’s Villages Denmark that shares the in-depth knowledge gained through the Living Places concept and a license to build the new care environments following the Living Places principles. In addition, VELUX Ukraine has entered an in-kind donation agreement with SOS Ukraine to donate windows to the new buildings.
For more information, visit https://sosbornebyerne.dk/childrens-living-places