New academic year 2022-2023 and brief at Diploma 8 in the AA
Forms for Living: Negotiating Artefacts for a Right to Housing in Large Mediterranean Cities
The advancement of third-wave neoliberalism and its narratives has cemented the notion that a house is a principal commodity – leading in turn to an escalating housing crisis worldwide. This condition is particularly apparent within the Mediterranean region, whose complex geopolitical position has exacerbated the pressures already placed on its existing housing stock. An influx of new inhabitants over the past two decades has added to the challenges faced by dense inner-city areas in the Mediterranean as a result of property speculation, the development of tourism and a shortage of social housing. These phenomena have reconfigured the areas of such cities that were once fundamental for social relation, comprising their liveability and necessitating the development of strategic new possibilities for housing through precise architectural solutions.
In this context, DIP 8 proposes to address the urgent lack of affordable housing in Mediterranean cities with a particular focus on the needs of the most vulnerable sectors of society: migrants, low-income families, the elderly and young adults. In pursuit of this aim, the unit will research architectural forms and typologies which can engage with emerging domestic cultures and structures, testing alternative spatial tectonics and local material techniques in order to promote sustainable and affordable construction in each specific context.
These investigations
will contribute to the development of a critical proposition defined by
an ‘architectural artefact’; one which can engage with the current
social, political and economic complexities of the cities in question.
To determine the positioning of this artefact, we will seek
opportunities within the existing urban fabric: reusing obsolete
buildings, repurposing existing infrastructures, reclaiming unused
structures or reconfiguring underused public-owned land. To enable a
form of ‘right to the city’, the artefact will not create a tabula rasa
condition but rather will negotiate with what already exists –
articulating the interactions between urban conditions and collective
human relations, and between the city and the domestic scale, through a
thorough investigation of architectural form.
