Vauxhall. Campus organisation for the new version of care environments 22-25

1 Introduction

It seems one can’t avoid the generic comment about how 'everything is changing so rapidly in all spheres of life today’ when talking about the transformation process of our cities. This work is acknowledging the same fact but concentrating on several very specific shifts and their implications in the context of the built environment.

1.1 Home and care: Today we see major changes in the way health and well-being are being delivered and how they are proliferated in the urban context. In general, the lifespan is increasing and the average retirement age is rising. People who require care or medical assistance, elderly people prefer not to downsize their domestic settings. They are looking for opportunities to receive care within their residential neighbourhoods or at home. In the case of moving to a care facility they are looking for richly serviced domestic settings of assisted living with a wide offer for everyday life choices instead of conventional serialised and isolated care environments. Consequently it raises a request for different levels of care being integrated into residential areas and their characteristics being rethought from the domestic settings point of view.

1.2 Synergies: Another important shift occurs in the knowledge economy. Science, research are conceived as public culture that should be accessible for everyone1 . Life-long learning patterns, request for cross-fertilisation of ideas and multidisciplinary approach create a need for new synergies. It puts additional pressure on the health and care providers. They become more interested in building upon the potential and extending the skill and knowledge set of their workers, the medical staff and caregivers. One of the ways to do it is creating opportunities for gaining additional practical experience, education, diversifying career opportunities and offering a wider range of civic services. This leads to new programmatic overlaps between care, research, cultural and educational environments.

1.3 Inner periphery future: The Covid-19 disaster naturally changed a lot in our lifestyles, vocations and habits. Forced to stay within our domestic milieu and our neighbourhoods for very long periods of time, we shifted our work and life patterns and brought new habits into the post-pandemic world. Having blurred the line between the work space and the dwelling, having become more flexible in our everyday routine, we inevitably started looking more actively for new versions of urban domestic life. Another issue the pandemic demonstrated was the imbalance between various parts of our cities in the way they are organised and serviced. In many cities including London the central areas that would usually be associated with busting activity from the early morning till late evening, vibrant business environments and concentration of people, suddenly became ‘dead’ for a long time. On the other hand, areas mostly residential in nature faced an unusual level of activity. But many neighbourhoods were not ready to provide for this change. A question arose: should our residential neighbourhoods be better serviced and provide the same richness and complexity as the central city areas? Is there a potential in redefining the inner periphery areas of our cities?

1 For example, the Zuckerman Mind Brain Behaviour Institute in Manhattanville campus conducts an outreach educational programme on brain science and organises free exhibitions, film screenings,etc. Wellcome Trust in London funded a Science Museum to share the history of medicine with a wider public; launches cultural and educational events and offers premises like library, galleries, reading room for the public. 01

Search for an architectural and urban framework that could bring the care and wellbeing agenda into our residential neibourhoods. A new version of a cluster is put forward in order to address each of these shifts and offer a revised version of a residential neighbourhood in the Vauxhall inner periphery area in London. It brings the notion of care in the heart of the design development and offers a setting where dwellings and care environments form a diverse field offering a range of care spanning from domestic household to institutional care facility. In general, the cluster requalifies the broken morphology inherited by the site from the postwar era chaotic development. The project offers to think in terms of a campus-like organisation, freeing the ground for pedestrian and service movement, relaxing the dependence on the streets and densifying the centre of the block.

[The issues mentioned above are not brought to light by this work for the first time and have been tackled before through design and in research2. However, the objective of this particular work was to address them in its own way, by learning from what is already being done in the field and making the design concepts work harder in a new setting]

2 By the Housing and Urbanism students as well. For example, in the ‘‘Eudaimonia’ and ‘Knowledge industries and the City’ publications.