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01. Urban

by Gianna Bottema
The dissertation investigates the typological transformation of elderly accommodation into decentralised models of care in place in the district. Currently, community-led care networks such as Buurtzorg, District Care, and care cooperatives are emerging through new legislation in order to encourage individual care agency and to collectivise care responsibility within the district. The shift in healthcare politics towards care in place emphasises the dwelling as a hybrid of public and private initiatives, linking
forms of assistance and dependency with everyday life. The collective organisation of care in the home environment introduces typological questions about the organisation of dwelling according to new protocols, procedures and common activities of care. How can the housing cooperative as a spatial and social framework organise collectivised care work, household activities and social support networks within the district?

This dissertation argues for an investigation into the threshold conditions of dwelling according to the social and spatial relations of care activities (therapy, care work, reproductive work, assistance and retreat). By proposing the thresholds as a key design tool, the dissertation aims to challenge the separation, classification and segregation of people according to age, illness and gender. The wellbeing of the human body
relates to the different dimensions of space and emphasises multi-scalar relations that stretch from the district to the domestic. Through an investigation of the different parts of the home, the project proposes to translate common activities and tasks into a collection of fragments, zones of interaction and threshold conditions. Accordingly, spatial design principles of cluster living reorganise the parts, and redefine notions of intimacy, privacy and the interior.

Read the full dissertation HERE

Gianna Bottema, Housing & Care Cooperatives in the Netherlands, Projective Cities, 2019

Gianna Bottema, Housing & Care Cooperatives in the Netherlands, Projective Cities, 2019

Gianna Bottema, Housing & Care Cooperatives in the Netherlands, Projective Cities, 2019

Gianna Bottema, Housing & Care Cooperatives in the Netherlands, Projective Cities, 2019

Gianna Bottema, Housing & Care Cooperatives in the Netherlands, Projective Cities, 2019

by Yi Shi

The thesis takes the urban small-scale factories as its vehicle to interrogate the dynamic role of urban production space to uncover the malleable correlations between our working and living. Based on the context of London and taking the mixed-uses typology as the object of investigation, The thesis investigates the abject history of the rise and fall of urban manufacturing to construct a grand narrative of the city's material reality through a series of case studies, which reveal the spatial and socio-political implications of the small manufacturing in search of new living models that ask for reconciliation between factory and city.

The thesis is structured by three interlinking chapters: manufactured city, outdated work and the compensatory fantasy. Each chapter finds its conclusions by synthesizing the research into a product of design. These chapters set the stage for three explicit research paths that link small manufacturing with urban habitual through reading the urban configurations, labour politics and material culture. It offers a lens through which one can analysis the relationship between individuals, their work, and the rapidly evolving landscape of urban material production.

Moreover, the project not simply advocates reintroducing industry back to the city, nor intends to celebrate the progress of production methods in the digital era, but inquires inward on the fundamental contradictions embedded in the act of making, asking for reconciliation between factory and city.

Read the full dissertation HERE

Yi Shi, From Factory to Fireside, Projective Cities, 2024

Yi Shi, From Factory to Fireside, Projective Cities, 2024

Yi Shi, From Factory to Fireside, Projective Cities, 2024

Yi Shi, From Factory to Fireside, Projective Cities, 2024

Yi Shi, From Factory to Fireside, Projective Cities, 2024

Yi Shi, From Factory to Fireside, Projective Cities, 2024

Yi Shi, From Factory to Fireside, Projective Cities, 2024

by Clinton Thedyardi Prawirodiharjo

The dissertation investigates alternative forms of community care in the context of London. In recent times, London municipalities have been responsible for delivering social care services for local communities, the majority in collaboration with private or volunteer agencies. Although the NHS delivers a high standard of service, health and care provision in London is still facing challenges regarding limited services, neglect and managerial barriers. Primarily, these issues are the legacy of the UK’s centralised system of care and the emergence of contemporary issues such as increasingly diverse communities, a growing elderly population and a rise in demand for mental health services. In response, communityled care initiatives organised in collaboration with local municipalities and care agencies are springing up in London in the form of daycare centres, senior clubs, various associations and volunteer carers to provide collective modes of care. At the same time, the provision of land by the Community Land Trust raises another possibility for establishing community-led care as a public-private project by shifting personal care in the dwelling unit to a neighbourhood care model.

Reflecting on the ambitions of the 2017 London Health and Care Devolution Programme, the project proposes the creation of a cooperative mutual care organisation to enhance integration between the local council and vulnerable communities. Through a cooperative strategy, the dissertation aims to respond to the spatial and managerial challenges of social care and community services provision at the neighbourhood scale. The research traces the history of the architecture of collective care in London and revisits alternative approaches in terms of social structure, forms of sharing and daily rituals through a collective way of living. The dissertation rethinks care through cluster forms as a typological and urban question to generate new possibilities for community care activities and protocols.

Read the full dissertation HERE

Clinton Thedyardi Prawirodiharjo, Care Devolution and Inter-Household Cooperation, Projective Cities, 2021

Clinton Thedyardi Prawirodiharjo, Care Devolution and Inter-Household Cooperation, Projective Cities, 2021

Clinton Thedyardi Prawirodiharjo, Care Devolution and Inter-Household Cooperation, Projective Cities, 2021

Clinton Thedyardi Prawirodiharjo, Care Devolution and Inter-Household Cooperation, Projective Cities, 2021

Clinton Thedyardi Prawirodiharjo, Care Devolution and Inter-Household Cooperation, Projective Cities, 2021

Clinton Thedyardi Prawirodiharjo, Care Devolution and Inter-Household Cooperation, Projective Cities, 2021

02. Ruralby Kaiwen Chen

In China, the traditional village has long been closely associated with the environment, which gathered idyllic imagination from an external gaze, represented by portrayals of rural lives from Tao Yuanming's idyllic poems from the early fifth century, written as a result of his political deportation, to the rural communes of modern time during the Down to the Countryside Movement between the 1950s and 80s. This idyllic imagination continues to be strong in the current trend that calls for a return to the countryside, where ideas such as self-sufficiency, back to the mountain, and seclusion have taken on different forms of rural idealisation as the relationship between urban-rural shifted over time.
However, from the internal perspective of village life, the idealization are not a desire for landscape, but rather a focus on pragmatism of village and it environ. The fever of immersing in nature, opening up wasteland and creating quaint society reveal the potential of this traditional form of live to cooperate not only within one another, but also with the environment. The research is based on the mountain villages of Beijing as a case to retrace the co-environ village life. Historically, this reveals the spatially cooperative activities of different groups, such as families, kinship networks, and production collectives, as well as family gatherings, farming, and festival rituals. These daily rituals occur in spaces closely linked to the environment, such as hamlets, farmlands, and natural spots. They are not nature, but exist as border territories, thus defining a continuous and hybrid landscape.
The disseration rediscovers and deconstructs the daily rituals of village cooperation; By articulating the co-environ devices, the project unravels the diagrammatic relations that describe the contact between collective organization and cooperative space.

Read the full dissertation HERE

Kaiwen Chen, Re-connecting Rural-Environ, Projective Cities, 2023

Kaiwen Chen, Re-connecting Rural-Environ, Projective Cities, 2023

Kaiwen Chen, Re-connecting Rural-Environ, Projective Cities, 2023

Kaiwen Chen, Re-connecting Rural-Environ, Projective Cities, 2023

by Clara Asperilla Arias
This dissertation examines the production of rurality through conditions of exodus between abandonment and colonisation1 in the “Hollowed Out Spain” across three key historical periods: 1950s, 1980s and currently the 2020s. The formation of the Spanish countryside as revealed in these periods shares the extended trend of rural depopulation in Europe, but presents a singular and intense case of demographic decline driven by specific sociopolitical, architectonic and territorial impositions.

Shrinking villages have not been able to retain productive ages, particularly the female population. Older generations have dwelled in extensive houses, and new generations keep exiting the countryside. State policies have been incapable of offering sufficient educational, cultural, health and care infrastructures for those who remain, prompting more of the younger generations to leave. These persistent conditions of exodus have produced particular subjects of rurality, manifested most profoundly across female generations having to settle or unsettle their roles within the dominant, patriarchal framework.

The recognition of a gender bias within this process of ongoing rural exodus provides the departing point in the construction of the connections between the landscape and the female body, the political control of territory and female subjects. The thesis will take a gender perspective throughout the whole dissertation, therefore the histories of colonisation and desertification of the Spanish countryside will be narrated through its female subjects, who conduct the different scales of the research from dwelling, household, settlement, to territory.

Read the full dissertation HERE

Clara Asperilla Arias, From Autarchy to Synergy, Projective Cities, 2022

Clara Asperilla Arias, From Autarchy to Synergy, Projective Cities, 2022

Clara Asperilla Arias, From Autarchy to Synergy, Projective Cities, 2022

Clara Asperilla Arias, From Autarchy to Synergy, Projective Cities, 2022

Clara Asperilla Arias, From Autarchy to Synergy, Projective Cities, 2022

Clara Asperilla Arias, From Autarchy to Synergy, Projective Cities, 2022

Clara Asperilla Arias, From Autarchy to Synergy, Projective Cities, 2022

by Wojciech Mazan

The thesis is recognizing the contemporary Polish countryside as a product of the state’s explicit social and spatial experiments. The central aim of is to conceptualize the rural landscape as a close relation to settlements, territories, and dwellings. With a focus on a particular type of ‘linear settlement’, the thesis starts by tracing through its transformations, implications upon a territory and the introduction of distinctive dwelling typologies. This reveals a chronology of transformations enacted through a long history of the state’s endeavours to colonize rural areas. The reconceptualization of the ‘linear settlement’ from a contemporary perspective offers a new understanding of their instrumentality, away and beyond their romanticization, where the countryside is read as space of struggle and resilience, rather than an idyllic landscape. The thesis studies past and present patterns of growth caused by internal migration from urban towards rural Poland which consist of 93% of the entire country. The timeline in question spans over three periods: early capitalist (interwar, 1918-1939), socialist (post-war, 1946-1993) and late capitalist (post-transformation, 1993-today). Each one can be read through a historical event triggering a change, a strategy introduced by the state, which effectively resulted in an architectural object – a physical embodiment of these processes – being introduced as an element of a settlement and enabled as a trace upon the land of transformation. The thesis proposes a reading of the rural landscape through the focus on changing relations between forms of dwelling and labour, which have often been overshadowed by the concerns of administrative division and political influence. Ultimately, the proposal claims that the countryside is not only to be understood through disciplines of sociology, demography, anthropology, and geography, but it can also be understood through architecture and become an independent project of architecture. By reconceptualizing the close relations between the three ingredients of a rural landscape, the project challenges the urban-rural dichotomy and questions the categorization of land in the present Polish context. In effect, it attempts to broaden the discourse and allows to extrapolate arguments to the wider context of post-socialist Eastern Europe and the Global East.

Read the full dissertation HERE

Wojciech Mazan, Proximal Relations, Projective Cities, 2020