Living Lands

Living Lands is designed to test the extent that architecture can find a productive overlap between three very current urban social issues:

1. How the tax system affects property values, and the negative impact this has on housing affordability.

2. The concentration of lower socio-demographic groups in social housing complexes and

3. The impacts that COVID-19 social distancing measures will have on the use and design of domestic and urban spaces.

The project uses this undesirable opinion of public housing in order to create affordable housing that also breaks down the social barriers that prevent social integration.

Meanwhile the COVID19 pandemic has pushed us from our offices, to working from home and forced us to stay 1.5m away from our family, friends, and neighbours.

Here lies the crux of this speculation, the need for dense, integrated housing within a pandemic that requires us to occupy more space that is too expensive for public services.

How do we enable social interaction when social distancing requires us to do the opposite?

My project is a housing project that attempts to seamlessly integrate public housing into private housing in order to bring down perceived land value and safely bring together communities that are being pushed apart by this pandemic.