Recipro-city – People's Choice for the Davidson Prize 2022

Project Statement

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Recipro-city explores how architectural interventions can help our community tackle challenges such as homelessness and loneliness, whilst continuing to build relationships and trust through the reciprocal exchange of resources, skills and knowledge.

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Our community of residents is drawn from vulnerable or marginalised groups or individuals who have faced adversity, whose neurobiology or life experiences have led – or forced – them to seek an alternative way of living. Our design concept, ‘Recipro-city’, proposes a model for co-living built on a reciprocal framework of positive, life-affirming actions. It provides opportunities for people to develop bonds that begin to address the nuance and complexity of the challenges our community has experienced, particularly loneliness and homelessness. Mainstream ways of living together or having a home of one’s own are becoming increasingly inaccessible and exclusionary; our proposal is a move away from capitalism and how we have traditionally assigned value to things.

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Instead, our design is built around the mutual exchange of resources, skills and knowledge, and where chosen activities and interests instead of conventionally paid work define how people contribute to and live as valued members of society, enabling individuals to grow over time.

Flexibility and adaptability are built into spaces that foster connections, including shared recreational and educational facilities, workshops, and restorative and recovery spaces, some of which have permeable boundaries that enable engagement with neighbouring communities. Integrating economic, cultural and social exchange, these spaces can be secured when necessary or opened up for community and public engagement of ground floor uses and maker spaces.

Importantly, our model is a work in progress, providing access beyond the physical and allowing the people who live there to shape how their community looks, acts and feels.