pankhurst social housing

type. design project

stage. five

date. dec 2022

description. ​

The brief for this project was to design a contemporary intersectional housing scheme responding carefully to the concerns of feminisms and different ways of living and a scheme which considers the Pankhurst Centre, its context and its surrounding community of feminist actors and other users. 

The housing scheme had to include three house types which are socially motivated through my response to the interconnected list of protected characteristics to enable a full exploration of the spatial potential of the complex issues of sharing internal and external domestic and social spaces across different groups of people of different ages, occupations and attitudes. My intersectional housing had to have a mix of tenure but it was suggested that they are resident led and managed with some shared responsibilities for communal labour and shared social spaces. I had to define these shared labour and social spaces in my own personal brief. The tutors were interested in my interpretation of the relationships between the protected characteristics to enable small but interesting and intersectional additional programme possibilities for the site and it was up to me to define what is shared space and what might be income generated space, what is public space and what is private space, and what is inside space and what is outside space. In order to help me define my own brief for this important yet complex issue, I had to think about the reasons behind my spatial proposals depending on gender equality, other family models, alternative child care approaches, new family roles, different economies, affordability, sustainability models, material choices, cultural differences and similarities and specific but different ways of living.