Why has working with lifestyles become so important?
After World War II, European cities faced such enormous housing shortages that the emphasis was on quantity, on mass production. However, once the most urgent quantitative demand for homes had been appeased, the demand for quality increased significantly. We have moved on from ‘every man a home’ to ’every man his home'. Individual demand has become more important than standardised supply.
Since the end of the 1990s, it is no longer enough to work only with target groups on the basis of traditional demographic indicators such as income, ethnicity and age. Society has become so prosperous that large groups are demanding the right to make more individualised choices based on personal preferences. Society’s traditional 'constraints and controls' have eroded. People’s origins, religions, professions and traditions determine behaviour less and less; individual taste is increasingly the overriding factor.
Because taste acquired a position alongside quantitative demands,lifestyles emerged alongside target groups. As such, lifestyles are not new – they have always existed. What is new is that lifestyle as a determinant of behaviour has become more independent of demographic and socio-economic characteristics than used to be the case.
Advantages of working with lifestyles
A lifestyle approach to regeneration projects has major advantages:
Policymakers get a better grip on demand.
Thinking in terms of lifestyles leads to an integral approach.
The approach allows for a compromise between mass production for target groups and hyper-individualisation.
The aim of a lifestyle approach is not to create idealised communities but to arrive at an understanding of the real behaviour patterns of groups of inhabitants.