StreetSpace 2024-25

 

StreetSpace 24-25 - Change-Stories-Housing

The housing crisis needs a human and design approach. This year the StreetSpace studio teams up with Participation and the Practice of Rights ‘Take Back the City’ Campaign and the ‘Change Stories’ project to investigate stories of housing, home and neighbourhood.

There are 56.000 families in the waiting list for social housing in Northern Ireland, while 21.000 houses are vacant. In Belfast there are almost 10,000 households in housing need, while over 80 hectares of public land are vacant within city limits. But these are not just numbers. People are living in inadequate housing and we, as architects, are well placed to understand and imagine what design can do to address this pressing social problem.

During the last 6 years, the StreetSpace studio has investigated housing and mobility in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods of Belfast. This year we will do something slightly different. In the context of the ‘Change Stories’ project, an international collaboration that uses storytelling to decolonise ideas of planning, we will work with Participation and the Practice of Rights for one year to engage with people in housing need. On the one hand, we will investigate Belfast housing, its history, typologies, schemes, delivery, mapping and density. We will use the databank of precedent typology studies of the past few years of the studio to understand their qualities. On the other hand, we will do an ethnographic study of stories of housing in Belfast, working with participants involved in the Take Back the City Campaign (PPR) and local residents in different neighourhoods of the city. This will involve a series of interviews, visits and focus group workshops in October and November. The second semester will be a masterplan of a section of the Mackie’s site, where students will propose a new sustainable neighbourhood with housing and a varied mix of uses. We will finish with an exhibition in June that will showcase the research and interventions.

Our partners and funders, Public Engagement at QUB, Housing Executive and Housing Associations support our engagement activities, including workshops, exhibitions and publications. We also have a series of partners that will enrich this live project. As well as the architecture training that is core to this studio, we will be supported by Dr Azadeh Sobout and Aisling Madden in ethnographic methods, and by planners involved in the Take Back the City campaign.

The studio is run by Agustina Martire and Tarla Macgabhann. Agustina Martire is co-director of the M.Arch and is especially interested in the way people experience the built environment, and how design can enable a more inclusive and just urban space. Tarla is a registered architect with over 20 years’ experience in London, Berlin and Ireland. He worked as senior architect for Daniel Libeskind and since 1997 he runs his own practice.

Our consultants this year will be Miriam Delaney, Brigit Hausleitner and Aoife McGee. Delaney is an architect and lecturer in architecture in TU Dublin and has most recently been involved in political advocacy and as a consultant on rural town regeneration projects. Hausleitner’s research comprises work on urban diversity and mixed-use cities, working to improve combinations of living and working. McGee is an architect and lecturer and is interested in an architecture which brings value to a community through socially conscious, contextual and climate resilient design.

The students in this studio will spend a significant time investigating people in need of adequate housing, to be able to formulate informed and professional proposals for programs and good quality buildings. In this studio you will experience becoming an architect in the complex reality of everyday life and the role you can have as a designer in delivering good quality, inclusive, mixed use housing to communities that sorely need it.