Lavinia Scaletti

‘Houseless not Homeless’ is an urban strategy programme that questions whether the possible solution for the London Housing Crisis would be to stop building houses and imagine a new infrastructure of home. Do we need houses? Can we change the way housing is conceived and understood? And how to combine the high-efficiency of a houseless system with the more psychological requirement of home in a Post-House condition?

With an estimated population of 10 million people in London by 2035, there is an urgent need of building and providing houses. However, with a building target that is met by less than a third every year, this solution is far from viable. As a consequence, more than 300,000 people will be left with no home.

The project promotes an architecture for the new houseless condition through the implementation of an infrastructure of Urban Homes. A system of buildings and spaces is put in place and distributed around main transport hubs to facilitate an increasingly mobile life in the city and to allow citizens to feel at home outside the confined boundaries of the dwelling. Urban Homes promotes a new collective lifestyle where the boundaries between public and private, individual and collective are redefined and where individual lifestyles and identities can flourish.