Research Information System
ENHR Grand Paris 2025: Affordable Housing in Greening Cities, Paris, France, 30 June - 04 July 2025, pp.211, (Summary Text)
The village, both as a physical entity and as a conceptual model, has been reconfigured within the urban fabric— sometimes as relics of a bygone era, sometimes as marginalized enclaves within the sprawl. This transformation, shaped by the relentless growth of cities, prompts reflection on how traditional, landscape-embedded set- tlements encounter contemporary processes of urbanization and socio-economic fragmentation. This paper presents a pedagogical experiment developed within an undergraduate architecture studio, which takes a peri-urban territory as its ground of analysis. Situated at the intersection of rural memory and urban expansion, the site presents a landscape in flux, where remnants of village life, informal housing, gated communities, and speculative developments coexist. The studio became a space to critically explore the socio-spatial entanglements of this rural-urban interface. Students were encouraged to interpret the village not as a romanticized artifact but as a living spatial model capable of informing socially cohesive and contextually grounded housing strategies. This prompted engagement with two diverging socio-economic models: one rooted in communal reciprocity; the other, in privatized development and fragmentation. Through site visits, mapping, and design research, students examined how housing becomes a site of negotiation between inherited spatial logics and new urban pressures. Their proposals drew from rural typologies— incremental growth, landscape embeddedness, and collective life—to imagine housing alternatives attuned to affordability, inclusion, and spatial justice. The studio offers a place-based, qualitative approach to housing pedagogy rooted in the lived complexities of transitional urban geographies.