"For the outbursts of a three-year-old, architecture is ultimately to blame" I recently read in an article, waiting to see where it goes.
It was referring to the familiar lifestyle that young couples have today, raising their children in small confined spaces…alone.
As a society we have self-arranged ourselves in our "boxes", apartments or detached houses, literally and figuratively, as units that have no interaction with each other.
How "normal" is that?
Humans, until relatively recently, have always lived in communities to ensure safety, socialization, and shared resources. Our brains are programmed to live close to others, share food and tools, protect each other and exchange information.
Nowadays, communities exist only digitally, people live close to each other without communicating, resulting in phenomena such as social isolation and social exclusion intensifying with the well-known consequences on the psychology of all of us.
This has an impact on children as well. "It takes a village to raise a child" says an African proverb, reminding us that it takes a whole village to raise a child with care, creativity and security. So somewhere along the way we lost the village and so now the children are deprived of the experience of interacting with people of different habits and personalities.
But I strongly believe that people and societies, during their evolution, listen to their real needs and make moves to correct their course and find solutions.
From time immemorial, the role of architecture has been to create spaces that will provide solutions to the needs of each society but also to propose new ways of living that will inspire and motivate creation.
For some decades now, a so-called new housing model called "co-living" has appeared and seems to work as an answer to the problem.
So what is "co-living"?
Groups of people, families or individuals agree, defining some rules among themselves, to "stay together" while maintaining their privacy, but sharing part of their daily life with others, thus strengthening the feeling of cooperation and "belonging".
So everyone has their own private space, bedroom, bathroom, maybe even a small kitchenette, but they share with the rest of the "co-residents" the dining room, a large kitchen, storage areas, laundry area, but also gyms, bars, workshops, cinema.
Many times people or families with common goals, programs, culture, age and ideas choose to live together. But sometimes "co-living" is made up of people of different ages, nationalities and qualities aiming to benefit from the interaction with the different and the foreign.
In the philosophy of "co-living" the home is treated as a container of life (Konstantinidis...), a space that cultivates relationships, creativity, equality, tolerance and cooperation and not individuality and self-centeredness.
So this way of life seems to be becoming more and more widespread in recent years since its advantages are many.
Certainly an important motivation to choose this housing model is the low cost since many expenses are shared, but also the possibility to settle for only a few months, thus supporting digital nomads.
Today it is an increasingly widespread model in many countries such as Germany, England, Spain and America, while many large companies, seeing the great appeal it has, invest in the "co living" business.
But I believe that the real reason that this phenomenon is gaining greater and greater dimensions is the need of people to exist in a smaller scale society, to find their "village" again, to feel that they belong to a group of people whose relationships are based on solidarity, cooperation and equality, and for children to find their freedom and balance so that they don't have to break out.
And maybe architecture can help with that.