INSTITUTIONAL FORMS & URBAN LOGICS

Projects
Articles
Salons + Definitions
Workshops
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Biographies + Acknowledgements

The notion of the nuclear family emerged as a result of the industrial age when rural extended family life was shattered and replaced in the metropolis. Today in the information age the nuclear family forms later and splits sooner1. Statistics show that this trend will become more and more usual. The nuclear family has gone from being the idealized norm of the developed countries to become one of several possible stages in the lifespan of the urban family. In my project I am exploring the institution of family and questioning the nuclear family’s role as the norm around which we plan, estimate and regulate.

Institutions standardize behaviours and carries habits between generations and are therefore of great importance for the social order. On a deeper level, they are central to our worldview and the ability to orient ourselves; Institutions convey meaning to our miljö.2

The miljö is about spatiality, what surrounds the individual:

Miljö is the external condition that is believed to exert a decisive influence on someone’s development; the environment (of a natural or communal kind) which one occupies; the atmosphere; sometimes more tangible.

Through these statements the family can be seen as an institution and the direct miljö of the family can be seen as the home. The family is considered to be the most fundamental unit of a society. Yet the family in itself is no a stable entity. Common to most people during their lifetime is to belong to least two families, namely the family you’re born into and the one yourself form. A family’s development moves cyclically between the addition of new offspring and new members as well as to decimation and fragmentation through emigration, marriage and death. The British professor Richard Wilkinson’s research around inequality within societies shows that in the most equal societies, there is a general open view of the family and a more co-operative and sharing mentality. These countries all have a greater social wellbeing that can be measured by: high life expectancy, math and literacy knowledge, level of trust and social mobility, yet low rates of infant mortality, homicides, imprisonment, teenage births, obesity, mental illness – including drug and alcohol addiction.4 Instead of privileging the nuclear family above other constellations by treating it as the basic social unit, we should look upon the family as an entity that is constantly changing along with its members. One stage could be a nuclear constellation but the next might be a different one. A nuclear family is just one of the multiple stages and constellations that exist within a family’s lifespan. The programme of my project could be seen as a metaphor of a big family house where all the family members at some point have lived in all the different rooms due to certain need or events. In my project, the inhabitants of a co-housing block form a kind of extended family. I have started a survey around my site in Peckham knocking on doors, testing my hypothesis about the diversity of its residents, their domestic set ups and their dwellings and have photographed each of the families that I have met in their homes. The work has given me a deeper knowledge of their specific needs. Through this study I am aiming to put forward an alternative take on Boris Johnson’s spaces standards carried out as part of the London Plan. My alternative will advocate co-housing and shared space orientated schemes and developments.