New way of life

2.1 Typological exploration as a tool to reinvent the morphology

The range of conditions that we have discovered while studying the post-industrial fabric of the London inner periphery [the industry, the park and the high-street] opens up opportunity to start thinking about different versions of living associated with care that are typologically distinct. Currently there is a gap in terms of architectural scale in the area and neither of the present typologies offers a way of solving the conflicts of the site that we already had elaborated on earlier. The question of type and understanding of architectural intelligence that derives from it allows us to work with challenging urban conditions and generate long-term value in multiple ways. Accumulatively, we could change the way the morphology of the areas is working by shifting our attitude to the 3 distinctive settings explored above, and by introducing a new typological starting point for each of them.

A set of deep floor-plate clusters with a range of dimensions11 comes in occupying part of the existing industrial site. [35] The relevance of such morphology is in its flexibility and ability to be expanded or reduced over time in accordance with the changing area. Every cluster can operate as a single building with its parts benefiting from the services offered by others and the collective offer embedded into their architecture. However, each part is independent enough to be built separately and occupy land sequentially, not imposing master-planning solutions on the industrial land. The system of clusters does not choose a primary orientation and works with a version of frontality that is closer to the way a campus organisation operates on a landscape, with multiplicity of entrances and a network of secondary and primary paths.

The frontage of the existing park between the high street and the river is rethought by means of a linear form that shapes its edge and starts to slightly shift from the high street and terraced housing inside the park.[36] A linear element offers great opportunities for handling and shaping very different kinds of environments on both of its sides.

11 width: 23-28 m, length: 35-40 m.

Despite its rather simple form, it can create experiences and architectural moments that are never symmetrical in each part of the building. In order to understand the potential of a linear form, one might start by exploring the Am Lokdepot project by the Robertneun architects [37-39]. Located on the edge of the Gleisdreieck park in Berlin, parallel to the railway line, the project manages on the one hand to create a hardscape edge with ground that belongs to the city, the park itself, that assumes a possibility of an active play in the city, display activities, workspaces, etc. Clearly visible from the trains passing by, this elevation of the building is the one that allows us to quickly grasp its character in all its unity, notice all kinds of things that can happen in front of it. The opposite side of the project continues the logic of the existing residential fabric by attaching to the edges of the urban block and closing it off. This way, a very different kind of setting is created inside: a stepped terrain with a set of smaller courtyards, gardens, playgrounds, more self-contained area that is mostly enjoyed by the residents but is nevertheless accessible for everyone.

This demonstrates the different approach to linearity, and the difference that the question of orientation and handling of the facades makes to the way the building starts engaging with its surroundings. It can be particularly useful as an alternative to the linear approach of the high-street that creates a very clear distinction between the front and the back of the houses along it.

In the case of the explored site, this leads to the green space behind the high-street under-performing and acting as the backyard of the neighbourhood life. Operating with a different version of linearity, project starts to address both the adjacency to the residential environment in the east and the conditions of the park, allotment gardens and the river to the west. The western elevation faces the rethought version of the park12. It takes further the idea of urban gardening and brings in infrastructure to support the culture of the allotment gardens. On top of that, it diversifies the active landscape offer working with a range of sport facilities. The eastern facade addresses the current back of the high street, offering the existing housing playgrounds, water facilities, bike storages and gardens to share.

Car access to the park is limited and gives way to light mobility linking to other side of the river. The residents of the terraced houses of the area get more choice for their everyday activities within a new diverse landscape that acts as a threshold between the open and super collective realm of the park and the high-street, and the closed and very private spaces of their own back gardens.

Another type that contributes to the new version of a highstreet is a courtyard building offering a new archetype of a care home. [36] It offers an alternative to the current image of the typical ground floor found along highstreets by opening up generous double-height spaces to the use of the local community together with the residents of the home itself. Commerce gives way to civic-oriented settings like workshops space, a library, therapies rooms, as well as a shared green infrastructure in the middle, creating a transition from enclosed private gardens of the terraced houses. An image of such alternative to traditional housing found along our high-streets has been put forward by the WWMA architects in their Central London Almshouse project.[40-42] It has an ambition to tackle loneliness among elderly and low level of community engagement in the traditional terraced ‘villages’ found in London by creating a building that can become a node of interaction for all parts of the local communities and a tool to integrate those who need assistance and care into the life of the city. An important feature of the Alms house project is its attitude towards the notion of threshold and level of privacy available for its residents in different parts of the building. It offers a smooth transition between the noisy and collective at its extreme realm of the street, towards spaces of the inner yard and ground floor areas open for sharing by a smaller groups of people, still allowing ‘outsiders’ to come in. To the intimate space of the circulation galleries which thanks to their width can accommodate moments of encounter and communication but are only available to those occupying the building. And finally, to the secluded and private realm of the apartment and a care unit.

12 The thesis will elaborate in detail on the idea of the landscape and its specific elements that the project is putting forward in the 3rd chapter.

Am Lokdepot, Berlin, Robertneun architects. The hardscape of the eleation addressing the park and the railway in contrast to the environemnt of the backyard shared with the old residential fabric

Alms house, WWMA architects. Another version of the ground floor addressing a high-street; one that offers gradation of collectiveness and opportunities for encounter in different forms.

Shifts in lifestyle. Common approaches to care environments.

One of the fundamental values of thinking through architectural type is in finding relations between its form and ways of life it can offer. If we were to talk about the housing environments that are part of a new care ecology and have the care, health and well-being offer embedded into them, we should start by identifying the values of the contemporary society, the shifts that happen in the way we prefer to live today.

Among the most noticeable are two shifts. Firstly, that the concept of a nuclear family — defined as two adults with at least one child — has long ceased to constitute the majority of households13. We are now facing the world that is extremely diverse in the type of familiar constructs it accommodates14. The legal framework and demands of the market prevent us however from building housing that would fully respond to these changes15. Secondly, an extreme digitalisation and changing work patterns of the post-pandemic world gave rise to the second important shift. Today we are looking to stretch the domain of our private dwelling, exploring the different answers to the question of what we are willing to share. Besides the purely practical considerations like opportunity to collectively manage resources, share responsibilities and have access to much wider set of services even when downsizing one’s home, it starts a conversation about how domestic realm can give rise to the transformation of a wider urban area. An opportunity to accommodate a diversity of services and establish patterns of neighbourliness is directly dependant on the ability of type to experiment with the thresholds between the freedom of an individual subject and engagement in a series of wider networks. Extension of the domestic realm, experimentation with the threshold between communication in the group and retreat of an individual allow architecture to open up and create crossovers with a wider urban area.

Within the whole realm of care, the area of residential care for elderly has been most notably separated as a specific kind of care environment in the whole system. This is due to the fact that the demands upon this type of care provision are often among the highest. As a result, they present us with greater challenges of being integrated into wider urbanity. Therefore, for the purposes of this research, examples of care homes and assisted living environments for elderly are taken as starting points of architectural investigation as ones with the most challenging criteria of excellence.

If we look at examples of such care environments, we can get a sense that very often they are purely thought of as machines for service delivery. They are very often located in isolated rural settings where access to nature is one of the key requirements, and these environments are not designed to drive urban transformation and form life-long neighbourhoods. [43-54] Some of them, like the Belle Vue senior residence are located in the central cities environments but belong to the luxury end of the market and are still isolated from the life outside. Quite a few of these projects offer advanced typological diagrams, like the Home for Dependent Elderly People, or Peter Rosegger Nursing Home. However, they do not offer us opportunities for cultivating meaningful relationships across ages beyond highly engineered and institutionalised spaces, which also means they are not accessible for families.

13 Niklas Maak, "Post-Familial Communes in Germany”, Harvard Design Magazine, no. 41 (2015), http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/ issues/41/post-familial-communes-in-germany.

14 In addition to the familiar constellation of father/mother/child, there are more of the DINKs and LATs, the single parents, the divorcees, the part-time parents, the residents of functional shared apartments, the minimalists, the polyamorous, the multilocals, the digital nomads, and so on and so forth. Ludovic Balland, Nele Dechmann, ‘Duplex architects rethinking housing’, (Zurich, Park Books AG, 2021): 79.

15 Unlike, for example in the DACH region where the tradition of collective housing as well as ‘non-traditional’ housing forms have a long trajectory due to the specificity of legal apparatus and institutions in place.

43-44: Home for Dependant Elderly People and Nursing home. Spaces intended for collective experience are unproportionally large in contrast to the individual care units and do not offer any particular reason to occupy them, except for the dining experience.

45-46: Peter Rosegger Nursing Home. A beautiful typological diagram is thought of in terms of the service provision efficiency, not opportunities for meaningful interaction and building of networks.

47-48: Belle Vue Senior Residence. The project offers beautiful landscape elements and works with attractive materiality. It is however managed as a secluded entity that does not offer anything to the city around it and does not interact with it much.

44-46: typological exploration of the above mentioned projects as a way to ‘distill’ the main ingredients that constitute this type of care environments. These are: living areas of the individual care units, natural elements /green spaces, and service elements.

2.3

Deep floor-plate clusters: catering for care-driven domesticity

‘Architecture must take a more even-handed approach to satisfying the opposing needs for communication and retreat, while also devising ways to spatially combine them. We can understand them as poles of a dialectical system that not only specifies housing types but also determines urban space. Community hinges on a spirit of voluntariness. Its quality is manifest in the freedom of being able to swing back and forth between these poles at any given time’16

Re-evaluating the question of extended threshold between the collective experience and individual freedoms becomes key. ‘Traditional’ diagrams only offer a transition from an individual living cell reduced to a bare minimum to the highly collectivised space available for sharing to all the residents. An alternative is to create a more sophisticated gradation and organise common spaces that have character and are shared by those who have a sense of common culture. From a personal unit where one can productively spend time on one’s own to a space for hosting and sharing within a small group up to 10-12 people, to a bigger space open to wider set of neighbours. Here, the understanding the fundamental logic of a small group behaviour17 becomes important. Process of building meaningful relationships, acquiring relatively deep knowledge about others and participating in group activities gets challenging and ineffective after a certain number of people. In addition to the considerations mentioned above, one more starting point for a change is that the sense of common purpose and feeling of the common space can be cultivated through the ownership.

An elegant illustration of this notion can be found in the project of a Home for Senior Citizens by Peter Zumthor. [55-59] It works with a very simple diagram of a linear block where a set of living units is located on the one side of the building with all of them open into a common glazed gallery. If we look at the dimensions in the section, we can notice that the width of the shared gallery is the almost the same as of the private bedroom. The photos of the gallery show that the space inside the gallery has been appropriated by the residents in different ways. In general, it makes a very different impression than the large empty communal spaces found in other projects and comes across as a space loved by the residents and the one that is widely used by them.

16 Balland, Duplex architects rethinking housing, p 89.

17 We do not claim this work to have expertise in the question of the small group behaviour as a separate realm of psychology but we do offer a translation of it in relation to the realm of architecture and spatial organisation, learning from case studies found in the domain.

A chance for partial privatisation of the common space, spatial generosity with understanding of the numbers involved in different activities, shift in attitude towards the spaces of circulation and storage – these are among the notions on which the project starts to elaborate. It uses one of the newly introduced types, the deep floor plate cluster, to show different versions of dwellings that reflect upon changes in the way we live today and imagine more self-organised systems than the ones we see happening today. [60-61]

The first scheme [62-63] explores the rentable assisted living that could serve for people who are willing to downsize their households after a certain age but are not ready to give up on the set of services that the central city has to offer. The project suggests that they can lead an independent life but live in close proximity to their families and friends, being in control of the time they spend alone or with others. The spatial diagram is organised around the central axis – a widened circulation space that simultaneously acts as a social space shared and owned by all of the residents. [64] It then transitions through the bridges between the light-wells into spaces, each of which is dedicated to the life of 2 residential units. These ‘living rooms’ act as thresholds between the private realm of a single unit and the collective gallery. They give the residents an opportunity to host their friends and families without unnecessary intrusion into their private lives, or work on their own or with a single neighbour. There is geometrical complexity embedded into the structure of the living units themselves. Breaking from the traditional rectilinear form of a typical care unit, it works with an L-shape. It allows to avoid entering directly at the bed and micro-manages the separation within the unit itself: the storage and bathroom entrance are distanced from the area for working, sleeping, doing yoga or reading.

On the one side of the block balconies are arranged in a chequerboard way to provide more diagonal visual synergies and contact opportunities across the building. On the other side small terraces have more private character and can only be shared by 2 people who are also sharing the living room area. type addresses question of subtle gradation of privacy within the housing scheme

The gallery continues outside of the building, leading to the other 2 schemes within the same cluster. One of them offers a short-term lettable accommodation intended for the care staff, following a hotel concept.[65] Besides living units this part of the cluster also has access to research, library and write-up spaces. Such scheme allows those employed at the local hospital or local care facilities to arrange short-term stays in case they can’t travel on the same day or need several days to stay and work on their research without leaving their workplace.

In the third scheme, the logic of the diagram shifts from the one organised around the centre to the one that is works as a linear form, with clear differentiation between the two sides. [66] The access gallery is 3.5 m wide, is externalised and aims to be not only primary circulation space but again a space of encounter open for appropriation and adoption by the residents. The depth of the building allows to accommodate a dwelling for those who are in need of care and assistance on a more regular basis. The bedrooms organised in the same L-shape logic are brought in the depth of the apartment, with access to a spacious balcony that can be used for bringing the beds outside into the fresh air. The space between the entrance and the care unit is dedicated to dining and cooking and is adjacent through light-wells to a series of additional bedrooms. These rooms are intended for the care workers that need to stay overnight in order to look after their patients. This organisation can be used to serve not only the ‘intensive care’ units but the entire cluster.

Typical floorplan of a cluster working with deep floor-plate. Each part can work as an indepenedent unit but there are efficiencies to be gained both in terms of lifestyle and delivery model when the building is managed as a whole.

Widened central circulation space is open for appropriation and partial privatisation by the residents, and creates another opportunity for encounters assisted living with units for care staff

Another scheme is designed with life of potential key workers and their families in mind. [67-68] It can be inhabited by different groups of people: several individuals, non-nuclear families, families with several generations, etc. It elaborates on the idea of offering very different versions of sharing that we struggle to generate in the market-driven housing projects today. Our opportunities for encounter, social interaction and collective experiences are limited there by either spaces dedicated for very specific events or highly engineered and institutionalised settings. There is another approach pursued in such successful collective schemes as Spreefeld in Berlin, Musikerwohnhaus in Basel or Wohnprojekt in Vienna [69-71] that embed among other shared elements the notion of collective raising of children into their residential environments. Being parents becomes way easier as the realm of childcare is seamlessly integrated into their lifestyle along with work, education, leisure and hospitality.

The project offers to parents in the cluster opportunities to care for kids, share these responsibilities with other residents and have services that normally me imagine travelling far for, at their doorstep. Culture of trust and ‘beneficial togetherness’18 becomes crucial to the scheme. A daycare space is incorporated in the middle of the floor plate, integrated within the ‘collective’ part of the building – working spaces of different formats that are accessible not only for the residents of the building and act as resources for the cluster as a whole. This way the spaces that we traditionally would put on the opposite sides of the ‘need for privacy and isolation’ spectrum, like workspace and nursery, come right next to each other. It gives the residents flexibility in organising their daily routine between workplace, home and parenting responsibilities.

The side of the floor plate located across the corridor from the working area and the nursery is occupied by the double-storey apartments that share dining, cooking and recreational spaces on their ground floors.

Coming back to the question of which part of the everyday life one is ready to share, several projects would answer by saying: cooking and eating. And indeed these are things that we are usually not hesitant to be seen doing or to physically share with the others. The kitchen often becomes the part if an extended threshold that is part of the collective experience of the place and helps us to construct wider systems of neighbourliness and trust. In projects like the Riff Raff and KNSM kitchens are brought closer to the ‘active’ facades becoming part of the visual engagement with the surroundings and with the neighbours. [72-74] The project suggests to take the notion of such visual engagement and give it a supervision quality in relation to other environments. In such a way, that there is a layering to the spaces, starting from a shared kitchen lit by a light-well, through the shared gallery and to the nursery and workspaces. [75] It allows to establish a whole range of possible interaction patterns between the residents and the visitors of the building.

18 Katharina Borsi, Shapiro Anna, “Type, New Urban Domesticities And Urban Areas (http://cloud-cuckoo.net/fileadmin/issues_en/issue_38/article_borsi_shapiro.pdf)”, in Wolkenkucksheim: Internationale Zeitschrift zur Theorie der Architektur. 24(38), 149–166.

Wohnprojekt, Vienna. Shared spaces for cooking establish additional layer of visual angagement and supervision with spaces for childcare

Spreefeld,Berlin. Growing up in this project, kids get an opportunity to become part of an extended family that reaches way beyond their own household. They get to learn, play and share with the whole neighbourhood without having to leave the relam of their homes

Mehr als Wohnen, Zurich. An extended threshold between circulation space and the dwelling occurs through the cooking space. It does, however, depend on the individual household , how much is shared with the outside.

Spaces for cooking and dining become part of the visual engagement with the surroundings and is given supervisional quality in relation to the spaces across the hall.

New version of landscape becomes key to successful functioning of a care ecology. It explores the civic potential of green spaces in our cities, role of sport, food and event in establishing environments of care

3.1 Systematic approach to a new version of activity-based landscape

We have already identified the reasons that allow us to think about the potential of a new kind of care ecology and why it could be fundamental to transformation of neighbourhoods in the Wandle corridor of London inner-periphery. Requalification of 3 distinctive urban settings, new systematic approach to questions of servicing and mobility, and typological exploration of care-driven housing are the tools that the project operates with. Application of these tools invites us to think about a new kind of legibility that unites all of the project elements. If one elaborateson the tradition of high-streets in the UK: the underlying principle of them is a linear pattern of things one can do and services one can use, all united in a single system.

The aim of the project is to create a new version of system of accessibilities, breaking however from the regularity of a high-street and moving to a scale of a neighbourhood. The walk along the river Wandle could turn from a straight-forward route from A to B into a network of opportunities that one can take all along the way: from the requalified ground of the industrial area and the civic realm of the new care environments to the park and rethought high-street. A new version of landscape becomes key for shaping such network and shifting from the master-planning attitude to the landscape that is architecture driven and relies on different organisational devices.

The role of landscape [the green and blue infrastructure] in our cities as of a traditional picturesque environment that does not offer much apart from opportunity to observe nature, started to be rethought a long time ago by various architects and urban planners19. It is now rather seen as platform ‘that can sustain not only recreational functions, but also housing, services, educational, cultural functions an even becoming the surface for local circulation and active synergy’20. It also means gaining civic21 power: the role of landscape and of amenities it brings with, is to engage those who live around or are even just visiting, to give them an opportunity to participate in the decision-making that concerns the place. In the context of the project it would mean a shift from the corridor as a ‘diffused’ area to a series of neighbourhoods that nurture a sense of belonging and bottom-up patterns of communication.

Namely, the project rethinks the landscape through several key areas: health and well-being, urban agriculture and event, and sports. Active engagement with the water in various ways becomes important to all of them, so that the waterfront can turn into a significant place for everyday activities of the neighbourhood residents and guests.

19 e.g Parc de la Vilette, Gleisdreieck, Burgess park, Zaryadye park

20 Marlene Ortiz Rivas, Something like a park. The changing role of landscape as a tool for urban requalification (London: Architectural Association, 2020): 24.

21 In this research the word civic is used in the sense it was described by Peter G. Rowe in ‘Civic realism’: ‘to be civic is a position that requires, at heart, some kind of convergent or communitarian concept to which people’s conduct can correspond.’ Meaning the design that allows people to take responsibility for it, take part in the decision-making processes that concern the place and appropriate it in different ways.

Nordhavn waterfront, Copenhagen. Active use of the water resource together with developed systems of micro and smart mobility

3.2

Requalification of landscape: ingredients

We could start by learning from the cities that have a rich history of projects taking full advantage of their water resources. Kalvebod Bølge project and Nordhavn neighbourhood in Copenhagen, culture of ‘badis’ in Zurich [77-78] – are examples of how the waterfront can perform much stronger than a framing device to our walking and cycling routines. It starts offering an opportunity to have a quick chilly swim in the morning right in front of your house, or to store your boat in a shed just outside your office and go out fishing right after the working day is over. The riverside becomes a layered ground where we find things that traditionally are associated with the rural settings: fishing, bird-watching, doing water sports, etc.

The exceptional care that the local community22 has been giving to the river Wandle over the years helped to return it to ‘almost pre-industrial cleanliness’ 23 and support a rich biodiversity of the corridor. The river is therefore an amazing resource around which the landscape can evolve. The area that used to serve as the back of the working industrial sheds is now addressed towards the river, bringing in a rowing school, a boat workshop and partially supporting the urban agriculture and event infrastructure on the other side of the river. Further along the waterfront a new shed structure is brought within the residential development. It serves as water sports equipment storage and rental on the ground floor with direct access to the water and as a civic structure for residents on other levels.

One of the parts of the site heritage are the allotment gardens which are significant to the culture of the place. We could treat them as an opportunity to bring in the idea of food and food-related events as something that gives greater role to our assemblages. Projects like Le Paysan Urbain in Paris and the Omved Gardens in London are perfect examples of how the idea of gardening, urban farming and the general interest in food in an associational way are developed in our cities today. The idea of gardening at one’s private allotment is expanded into a whole system that has nutrition, awareness of what we eat and how it gets processed in its core. The actual process of growing up food is combined with questions of learning and inter-generational exchange. Greenhouses, orchards, gardens become places where one can hold workshops, community events, where children can come and learn through play and practice about crops, importance of biodiversity in our cities, and food production. Such a setting can give a new direction to how we curate events in our cities, from food-oriented workshops with renowned chefs to weddings on the waterfront. In the case of the project, location of the allotments just across the river from an industrial site opens up an opportunity to support the logistical side of the food and event-driven environments. Large flexible industrial structures and the new mobility system can be used to cover the servicing needs of the food production. [84] An additional layer of infrastructure is brought next to the existing allotment gardens – greenhouses, an orchard and spaces for catering and event-hosting. The existing sheds along the edge of the site house storage, waste-disposal, compost and shelters for delivery cargo-bikes. This way, elaborating on the cultural and historical background of the site, the landscape can be given a new vocation that celebrates food, brings people around eating and producing.

Another traditional element that the project is using is the idea of a Lido. Found in many boroughs of London, Lido pools have their own character and atmosphere and are sometimes rethought in connection with other amenities like restaurants and wellness facilities like the Bristol Lido. An outdoor swimming pool can be a rather obvious but nevertheless instrumental element of a landscape that targets promotion of health, well-being and care. Bringing it in the heart of a residential environment means another set of opportunities: swimming lessons, leisure swims, sun baths become the extension of the everyday life of the assemblage.

22 e.g. Wandle trust, Living Wandle projects. The Wandle Trust is part of the South East Rivers Trust (https://www.southeastriverstrust. org/) (SERT), an environmental charity which aims to deliver healthy river ecosystems across the south east of England.

23 Paul Talling, London’s lost rivers (London : Random House, 2011): 232.

The industrial land extends towards the riverand becomes a more civic-oriented surface housing a rowing school, a boat workshop, and a new walking and cycling route along the Wandle. They also act as supporting servicing infrastructure for the rethought realm of urban agriculture and allotments on the other side of the river

Industrial shed next to the allotment gardens can become a setting for catering event, cooking workshops, or arestaurant that collaborates with the producers next door and takes advantage of the freshly grown local foods. The dimensional characteristics of these spaces become instrumental to other spaces in the project. The gsubstantial height of the ceiling and large window surfaces on the ground floor becomes crucial to the quality of light and air, and to the range of programmes these spaces can accommodate

3.3

Organisation of the ground as a platform for new governance patterns

One of the goals of creating a multi-layered and textured landscape like the one we have been describing, lies within the realm of decision-making, governance and associationalism. The ambition behind the transformation of the neighbourhood is to shift from the notion of diffused area that is just formally part of a corridor to a place where its parts are linked together by networks of effective communication. Here, the patterns of civic participation and qualities of the landscape and architecture are tightly knit. A complex and layered landscape ‘thickens up’ the way in which we look at the urban area today, turning into a network of spaces where each of the elements provides a platform for moving to something else, in a pattern of an ‘active ground’. Each of the amenities in the landscape is a scene by which stakeholders, employees, residents engage with each other and contribute to the success of the place as a whole, so that the civic life is proliferated by a range of practices. In the case of the project, these practices evolve around ideas of food and event, sport, health and well-being, forming bottom-up organised systems that run through care, education, research, etc. Potentially, different versions of civic organisations beyond the realm of federal institutions could become interested in joining up and promoting a range of services and activities in this landscape. These sub-forming patterns of communication and civic life contribute to the way the local leadership can govern the area, by relying on those who are ‘closer to the ground’.

The question of associationalism is tightly knit with the sense of subtle variation, hierarchy and gradation of spaces that are embedded into the organisation of the ground and architecture. The project aims to start accumulating the sense of belonging, participation and create a ‘textured’ environment from inside the building to the realm of the landscape. We have already showed how exactly type can proliferate a sense of belonging and balance between the individual and collective realms at the scale of a dwelling and an assemblage. At the scale of the landscape, the rhythm of the spaces and their intersections become important. They change from the active, articulated waterfront of the industrial area, making a transition into almost campus-like organisation of the residential clusters where a network of courtyards, plazas and lowered gardens is formed. If the former offers open views on the water, visual engagement with the allotments and the park on the other side, the latter woks with subtle variations in the views that open between the buildings, wider range of sizes of spaces and more enclosed environment overall. Continuities between 2 sides become physical through the new system of light and smart mobility and extend towards the existing residential environments. There, again, a transition is formed between the dynamic, engaging qualities of the park and its sports-oriented part towards the residential realm that is nuanced through introduction of a new linear form. A careful attention to the nuances of the public realm lead to a changing logic of an inner-peripheral neighbourhood. A fairly simplistic relation between bifurcation of commercial life outside and the quiet domain of the residential life inside then gives way to a much more subtle gradation between spaces.

Altogether, each of the elements that constitute the new version of landscape within the project is articulated both spatially and in terms of the its collaborative character. This way, an overall purpose of a neighbourhood can be articulated almost sociologically. Through emergence of event structures and shared civic surface, not only the residents of the neighbourhood but those from outside can start relating to the culture of the emerging area and seeing themselves as stakeholders to its existence

Conclusion

Reflecting on this design-driven research, we would claim that now is the time we as an industry pay serious attention to the role that investment into realm of care can play for our cities. Care in its extended sense can become a strong driver for urban transformation, for formation of life-long neighbourhoods, support of strong intergenerational and intercultural networks. For the purposes of this research, we suggested as a first step to agree on the notion ‘care ecology’ as something that can represent the most broad and rich set of services, therapies, stakeholders and settings that are associated with the word ‘care’ today. And as something that can become an alternative to a traditional approach we see today, when the challenge of creating a care environment is treated as a challenge of designing a single care venue with considerations about its urban potential left aside. We exemplified only part of the goals that can be achieved by means of such approach. They include efficiencies that can be gained by those who become part of the rethought care system. Synergistic opportunities across sectors lead to creation of a wider network of services, where more diverse set of stakeholders and actors are interested in becoming part of it. This leads to varied careers offer, retainment of the local talent base, and generation of new type of residential environments that correspond with the changes in our lifestyles.

All of the ‘textured’ networks of a care ecology constantly reciprocate with the decisions we make with regard to the morphology of our neighbourhoods. We showed how attention to the way areas are organised, to the questions of scale, size, hierarchy, movement, direction become important for choosing tools for its transformation, and finding a key to making its morphology work. We also showed how morphological change is tightly knit with typological reasoning in architecture. Thinking through types allows us not only to boost urban transformation and react to very different meaningful conditions found in our cities but also respond to the shifts we observe in the way we want to live today. Together, using these tools we illustrated how the purpose of a neighbourhood can be translated as a way of life: when people start to relate to its culture, see themselves as stakeholders to its existence. The work looked into how collectivity can be formed around the notion of care; how our domestic life can be transformed in order to answer important questions about what are we willing to share today, how much we can see patterns of neighbourliness and care distributed across wider urban areas, and how we start forming bottom-up governing systems instead of dispersed ones we see in action today.

When asking the question about a potential location of a new care ecology, we suggested to pay attention to the areas located in the inner periphery in our cities, the ones that traditionally are considered challenging due to their structure, spatial characteristics, and qualities that have to do with ownership, market trends and lack of common vision about their vocation. Areas like this, often found along significant water routes in London, come from an industrial past and present us with conflicts: fabric disrupted by industrial heritage, large scale transport armatures, gaps in scale of the built. An indicative site in one of such corridors was used to show that these parts of the city offer us nevertheless exciting resources and are a valuable alternative for the central city areas exhausted by development pressures and constraints. Broadened understanding of a care ecology as a driver of change, systematic approach to an activity-based landscape, new systems of mobility, and typological tools can give us a key to start looking at the corridor in a more structured way. This way, a dispersed area that is unthinkable today in the context of the traditional care environments, has a potential of becoming a set of well-defined, interconnected care-driven neighbourhoods.

This thesis is not offering a ready-made solution but should rather be seen as a starting point to begin raising questions about what our next steps in requalifying the challenging areas of our cities ought to be. The majority of solutions that we implement today at the post-industrial inner-peripheral areas are not viable enough as they are controlled by the market ambitions and restrictions, and as a result, we tend to only contribute to the disjunctions within this fabric. Unfolding the richness of care ecologies as drivers of urban transformation, we could start taking full advantage of the resources and infrastructure these areas have to offer. Relying on the naturally sub-forming patterns of association, to start building attractive neighbourhoods that cultivate a sense of belonging, shared ownership, and give rise to the civic life of a new quality.

Bibliography

Ábalos, Iñaki. The good life: A guided visit to the houses of modernity. Zurich: Park Books, 2019. Lim, CJ. Food City. Oxford: Routledge, 2014.

Aureli, Pier Vittorio, Martino Tattara. “Production/reproduction: Housing beyond the Family”. Harvard Design Magazine, no. 41 (2015). Accessed April 23, 2022, http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/41/production-reproduction-hous- ing-beyond-the-family.

Balland, Ludovic, Nele Dechmann. Duplex architects rethinking housing. Zurich: Park Books, 2021.

Beundermann, J., Fun, A., & Hill, D. (2018, July 11). Places that work. Centre for London. Re- trieved January 23, 2022, from https://www. centreforlondon.org/publication/places-that- work/.

Borsi, Katharina, Anna Shapiro. “Type, new urban domesticities and urban areas”. Internationale Zeitschrift zur Theorie der Architektur, 24 (38), 151-166. Accessed April 23, 2022, https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1229979/ type-new-urban-domesticities-and-urban-areas.

Donzelot, Jacques. The policing of families. London : Hutchinson, 1980.

Gameren, Dick van. The Urban Enclave = De Stadsenclave, Rotterdam : NAi Publishers, 2011.

Koolhaas, Rem. “The Generic city”. In B. Mau and OMA. S,M,L,XL. New York: The Monicelli Press (1995), p. 12481264.

Maak, Niklas. “Post-Familial Communes in Germany”. Harvard Design Magazine, no. 41 (2015). Accessed April 23, 2022, http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/41/post-familial-communes-in-germany.

Rowe, Colin, Robert Slutzky. Transparency. Basel; Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1997.

Schmid, Susanne, Dietmar Eberle, Margrit Hugentobler. A history of collective living : forms of shared housing. Basel : Birkhauser Verlag, 2019.

Steel, Carolyn. Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. London: Vintage Books, 2009.

Talling, Paul. London’s lost rivers. London: Random House, 2011.

Ungers, O. M. (Oswald Mathias). The Dialectic City, Milano : Skira, c1997.