Housing the Social: Testing framework for an urban community

Abstract

Housing pressures in favour of 'quantity over quality' can allow homogenization of the built environment to prevail; consequently, the humanness of the urban environment can be overlooked. The social value of resulting architecture can be left subsidiary to political, economic and aesthetic factors. This thesis, therefore draws upon a social awareness in response to the current agenda for the re-development of 139 Greys Avenue, Auckland, New Zealand. The existing 87-unit modernist social housing building will be replaced with a new 280-unit apartment complex to rehouse the state tenants. The proposal falls into the cyclic nature of 'un-slumming and re-slumming, where the intensification of the pre-existing condition could resultantly mirror the original situation that was trying to be solved. Though the proposed brief stipulates a positive effort to provide social and communal facilities to create a 'sense of community,' this thesis questions how architects can design beyond the idealistic notion of community and rather design for the self-creation of a resilient, urban community. This study proposes a design framework to facilitate the development of an urban community, within mixed urban housing on Greys Ave. With the focus on social cohesion, community resilience and heterogeneity in the urban fabric, the framework seeks not to instruct or control aesthetic, but allow for ongoing social governance and vitality. This design testing ground draws upon the analysis of modernist social housing responses and the communal, social space of informal architecture. As a result, the priority of shared, communal space is privileged over private, domestic space. The design respectively comprises the clustering of mutual spaces between public and private realms, as the intrinsic connector of space, whilst specifying social diversity, density and security. The designing of parts tests the framework within an iterative system of response. Subsequently allowing for an ongoing and mutually responsive relationship between architecture and the framework in which it resides.