Producing affordable housing for people in need allowed us to investigate the most minor details of their present living and basic needs. The public is not only devoid of proper facilities but also lacks the basic need for living hence this project was a challenge for us rather than a competition. Said that, we decided to choose our site with a strong and cogent context because giving context to the design makes the idea a well knitted and structured solution with a strong base to follow for the people it caters to. One option can be to choose a land in the center of the city, preoccupied by illegal dweller. This prohibits the shift of people to outskirts and enables them to utilize their daily efficiently.
A well-Engineered building or a housing scheme is not able to fulfill all the requirements of such society. It is vital to provide spaces which are easy to relate. Our unit design is derived from ideal setting for social housing. Any social housing be it chawls or traditional villages, all tend to run on the concept of socially interactive spaces reducing spaces within the house and increase it outside. This enables them to spill out and sit & interact outside their houses in these corridors, streets & chowk. The units are arranged along a single loaded corridor with a street in middle and roads on either side.
The conventional housing solution provides option of a doubly loaded corridor or an isolated core unit cluster. But both the options have space constraints in providing socially interactive spaces eradicating the idea of pedestrian street.
Hence, we use this aspect as the base of our design and propose a unit linear in shape which is a combination of opposite units in the above scenario. This leaves us with a road on one side of the unit and the other automatically turns into a spacious street as wide as the road. This idea generates more units in same area with strong socializing spaces amidst the unit clusters. The linear plan is not only satisfactory socially but also internally as it receives opening at both ends incorporating all the requirements and promotes interaction at household, community, and neighborhood level.
