Co-live: A Senior Living District in Rabat That Trades the Nursing Home for a Neighborhood

Most housing for the elderly is designed around a corridor, a bedroom and a nurse's station. Co-live starts with a different question: how can a place built for older people provide assistance without taking away their independence? The answer here is a district rather than an institution. Housing, cafés, shops, gardens, libraries, fitness areas and healthcare spaces are woven into one continuous urban fabric, so that receiving care becomes one part of daily life instead of the whole of it.

Designed by Vera Derzhavina, the project was Shortlisted in the Co-Life competition. It is sited in Rabat, Morocco, and planned for approximately 4,000 elderly residents. At that scale the proposal behaves less like a building and more like a piece of city. It asks how architecture can respond to the physical realities of aging, such as limited mobility and the need for help with cooking, cleaning and healthcare, while keeping residents tied to the social life around them.

A Block That Reads as a Neighborhood, Not a Facility

The isometric view sums up the project's attitude. A terracotta-toned block rests on an arched ground floor, with palms planted on the roof and blue perforated canopies throwing long shadows across the ground. There is nothing clinical about it. The arcade at street level suggests shops and cafés rather than a reception desk, and the roof is treated as usable territory instead of mechanical space.

This matters because the brief Derzhavina sets herself is about choice. A resident might spend the morning reading alone in an apartment, walk a communal terrace in the afternoon, stop at the library or café, and attend an evening activity without ever leaving the neighborhood. The building has to support every one of those modes, and it does so by layering private rooms above a public, porous base.

Streets Carved Between Winding Earthen Walls

Rather than lining up conventional linear housing slabs, the masterplan uses low-rise blocks that keep turning and changing direction, an organizing idea the project describes as an architectural "snake." The street view shows what that produces at eye level: a narrow passage between earthen walls, pointed arches, lattice balconies and a bridge spanning overhead. The proportions feel close to the medina tradition, where tight streets hold shade and keep walking distances short.

For older residents, that compactness is a practical advantage, not just a stylistic reference. Courtyards, gardens and sheltered pedestrian routes form a network where the next bench, doorway or neighbor is never far off. The bridges between blocks also hint at upper-level links, which reduce how often residents have to come down to grade to move around.

Rooftops Shaded Into Shared Living Rooms

The rooftop terrace may be the project's most persuasive space. Blue perforated canopies sit on timber posts above lounge seating, dining tables and palms, filtering Rabat's sun into dappled light. It is an outdoor room scaled for the kind of slow, social time that a retirement facility rarely makes room for: a shared meal, a conversation, an afternoon spent outdoors without exposure to the heat.

By turning roofs into communal terraces, the scheme doubles its social surface without expanding its footprint. It also gives each cluster of residents a semi-private gathering place, a middle ground between the solitude of an apartment and the busier life of the street below.

Straight, Corner and Turning Modules as a Shared Language

The three-panel sheet and the general plan reveal the system underneath the variety. Residential buildings are assembled from repeatable modules: straight pieces, corners and turning configurations that can be combined into different block geometries. The plan shows interlocking terracotta bands wrapping around a central courtyard, while the section reveals stepped street facades that let light reach the lanes and give upper levels access to terraces. On the elevation, stairs lace across an arcaded front, so circulation becomes part of the facade's visual rhythm.

The modularity also works at the scale of the room. Single rooms can be combined into double arrangements, and different ground-floor modules take on different public and communal uses. That flexibility lets housing adapt to individual residents and changing needs without breaking the development's overall identity. Instead of designing each building as a separate object, Co-live sets up a kit of parts that can grow and adjust across the site.

Why This Project Matters

Senior housing is usually framed as a care problem with a building wrapped around it. Co-live reverses that order. It treats aging as an urban condition and responds with streets, arcades, courtyards and roof terraces, the same elements that make any neighborhood livable. Care is still present in the programme, but it sits alongside cafés, shops and libraries rather than defining the experience on its own.

The strongest move is pairing a strict modular system with a plan that refuses to be monotonous. The "snake" geometry, rooted in the climate and spatial traditions of Rabat, shows that standardization and a sense of place can coexist. For a typology often criticized for isolating the people it serves, that is a useful and transferable lesson.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Vera Derzhavina

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Project credits: Co-live by Vera Derzhavina Co-Life (uni.xyz).