To adapt to new forms of cohabitation, let us rethink housing – Liberation

From April 3 to 6, 2025 in Bordeaux, The quartus endowment fund for architecture Organizes a series of urban meetings, workshops and explorations on how to design and live in cities. An event that Release is a partner.

The pandemic and the environmental crisis are all ultimatums which we summon to rethink the means of guaranteeing a private sphere in a shared world, without exclusion, by abolishing the separations between interior and exterior, places of life and work, even between neighbors. In order for these different gradients of isolation and sharing more easily, it is no longer a question of designing the house only according to its occupants. Housing becomes the determining element to transform the way in which cities are built by going beyond binary opposition between private and public, urban and rural, owners and dispossessed, resources and waste.

We must consider housing as a place that does not encourage divisions between social classes, genres or activities. We must find new ways to connect a bed, a sidewalk and a water supply system. Some say that it is useless to build new and that we should only reuse existing vacant spaces; Others say that over the next 25 years it will be necessary to build 300 million new housing in the world. Anyway, today, one in four people lives in a slum. During the pandemic, it has become obvious that the accommodation cannot be seen as an isolated element but that it is part of a complex system of connections which make it a deeply interdependent network.

Our cities exacerbate the contradictions between vital needs and unrealizable desires, between basic subsistence and outrageous waste, between the advantages of sharing and the refusal to cooperate. This implies modifying our understanding of the community and independence. Defining a place to oneself supposes to delimit it in one way or another, and our future depends precisely on the way in which these demarcations we will establish. We must question the current mechanisms of land ownership, and go beyond the idea that everyone defines themselves by what they have. We must reconcile the need for privacy with the needs of others and with the use of renewable resources. Housing is the basic element which makes it possible to reconcile the important incompatibilities between the privileges of some and the needs of all.

The design of housing requires that we redefine the concepts of intimacy and cohabitation, production, consumption and rest, in a world that we have invented for ourselves and that we are trying to control, but whose intrinsic logic we have misunderstood. These contradictions result from three founding myths of the modern house: the house as a place of rest, as if the work could be separated from the rest of life and that our domestic tasks could disappear; The house as a private property, accessible to all, as if the economic equation did not often make it, by definition, unaffordable for the majority; And finally, the house as a sanctuary for the nuclear family (husband, woman, children), as if there were no other forms of cohabitation and that the private and public spheres were independent.

The desire to build together a city that resembles us takes on a whole different sense in a country like Mexico, where more than 70 % of the constructions are informal (self -constructed). In many regions of the world, participatory design is not an aspiration but the only way to build if you do not have access to specialists and if you cannot afford the services of an architect or a building company.

The absence of long -term planning or vision as well as the multiplication of individual desires distant from any common project must warn us against the romanticization of the favelas improvisation dynamics. The complex nature of floods, earthquakes and fires, as well as the imperative need to achieve a balanced relationship with natural resources, oblige us to conceive housing that are not separated from transport, water storage methods and even food production. This can only be done if we stop confining architecture to the buildings only and that we anticipate the consequences of individual desires on a shared territory.