Courtyard City

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Courtyard City

Type

Residential › Apartment Multi Unit Housing

By 2050 Spain will have the world’s oldest population, with 40% of its citizens over the age of 65. With this demographic shift come significant challenges to the integrity of the fabric of Spanish culture.Spanish families tend to be extremely closely knit, with grandparents playing an active role in the lives of their children and grandchildren, often providing after school care for the latter and other logistical support activities for the former. In turn, families tend to provide at home support for their senior members as they age, so much so that only 2.7% of Spanish seniors who require some sort of extra assistance in their daily lives receive it from people other than friends and family.Unfortunately, the coming demographic shift, accompanied by the current state of economic turmoil, threatens to alter this balanced integration; potentially isolating senior citizens from their social support networks and families, who may no longer be able to afford to care for them.In response, we propose a model of social housing that allows for families to maintain high levels of intergenerational connectivity while also fostering individual autonomy. At the same time, the project seeks to fulfill Ildefons Cerdà’s egalitarian vision for Barcelona by returning public space to the street and the square, in this case through the population of a courtyard of an existing building in the Poble Nou neighbourhood with a dense mix of complementary programmatic elements.