The Place for a Village

The project aims to find a better way to design social housing: a place for a village, where residents can feel part of a community and be socially engaged, a place that helps remove stigma and marginalisation of the most vulnerable. Affordable housing doesn’t have to look “cheap” - everyone has the right to a decent home.

This project highlights the importance of shared spaces and common areas to incentivise connection and communication between residents, allowing to improve an individual experience through the collective: the apartments are structured in a way that promotes visual connection and a hierarchy of spaces from public, semi-public ground floor plaza

to semi-private and private.

This model also allows for adaptability to different household types and growing

families, where each resident can customise the external semi-private space in front of their apartment with additional rooms or simply paint it with the colour they prefer and make it their home.

The shared spaces and common areas, on some floors, and the roof, focus on flexibility as well, leaving plenty of room for the residents to customise and decide how to use them for various social events, clubs, sport or simply to unwind.