> New Logics of Connectivity: Housing, Care, and the Urban Field​

> UK

>FINALIST

Team Members:

​
Sara Anand,

Yara Galal,

Priscila Mauro,

Stavros Oikonomidis,

Julian K. Siravo,

Sida Yan

This proposal is pivoted on housing, developing distinct typologies that respond to issues of isolation and loneliness amongst city dwellers as well as the long term care needs of ageing populations. It attempts to establish new collectivities of intimacy and care through its non-familial, non-domestic relocation and a non-gendered, non-binary subjectivity. To do so, it disrupts the 19th century socio-spatial diagram of domesticity – defining familial relationships, kinships and hierarchies; gender-based roles; private and public behaviours of intimacy and care – that constitute the contemporary micro, two bedroom and three bedroom housing typologies.

The maisonette type micro apartments provide for a sleeping and an individualized work activity. These generous spaces include no kitchens and are instead serviced by the professionalised public canteens sitting within the podium. Professionalised laundry services are planned in adjacent blocks.

The perimeter block comprises of 2-9 bedroom apartments based on collective living protocols. The 9 bedroom large household is conceptualised for a non-familial living arrangement. Each floor of the block includes a care room for bed-based care activities relating to the temporal well-being of the body. Additional spaces for socialising and communal activity in the block include a desk-based workspace, a sauna, a laundry with a living and play space, a 4-metre wide lazy circulation, a rooftop terrace and a rehabilitation centre.

The design proposal sees the redistribution and integration of spaces, practices, facilities for care and mutual aid as the necessary collective equipments within the dwelling unit, the block, the ground and the neighbourhood. By extending the boundaries of the unit and its associated human existence into the public atrium, podium, courtyard and street, it allows for a minimization of the unit without the loss of a collective social infrastructure. This small living, large life concept not only challenges the notions of a defined private and public realm but also provides opportunities for direct forms of participation in the management of a housing-led urban infrastructure. Thereby, disrupting the modern city as an agglomeration of private, isolating silos to a distributed network of social care infrastructure