Gillian Horn will join the initial meeting of experts group for London Housing Design Research Project on Friday 17th May.

The group has been established to help develop ideas for a design research project, run through the Centre for London Urban Design (CLOUD) at the Bartlett School of Architecture, which aims to envisage new models of socially mixed housing.

This EU-funded research project is linked to a parallel exercise at the Department of Architecture in Chalmers University, Gothenburg, as a comparative study between Britain and Sweden, and is to be completed by March 2020. The aims of the research project are twofold:

  1. To create two specific case-study projects as a means to propose new design ideas for socially mixed housing in London and Gothenburg in a way that is closely informed by SME firms and other external stakeholders, and which focusses on the reuse of run-down former riverside/docklands areas;
  2. To demonstrate a wide variety of architectural design research methods and findings via a showcase report/portfolio arising from these two projects.

The experts’ group members have been selected for their expertise in the design and delivery of socially mixed housing, while also being able to bring in an awareness of wider factors such as urban planning, real estate, finance, legal constraints, tenancy management, etc. The emphasis will be on using creative design methods to think of ways of addressing housing needs.

Topics for discussion will include land availability, finance models, design approaches and construction methods. Other issues such as social equality, gender, ethnicity and community involvement will also be included.

The group will join a wider joint-workshop event, to be held in London between UCL and Chalmers University in November 2019.