Riyadh For All: Rebuilding Rabat's Multigenerational Life Around the Riad Courtyard

Most senior housing begins from the assumption that old age needs its own building, set apart from the rest of the city. Riyadh For All starts from the opposite premise. It treats the knowledge held by older people as a resource worth organizing a neighborhood around, and it borrows the traditional Moroccan riad, with its courtyards, narrow passages and shaded communal rooms, as a social system rather than a style.

Designed by Ketki Mahadik for the Co-Life competition, where it was selected as an Editor's Choice entry, the proposal is set in Rabat, Morocco. It combines housing, care, cultural exchange and community life into an intergenerational model for active aging, one that asks elders and young residents to share the same streets, tables and courtyards rather than simply live near each other.

Reading Fragmentation Across City, House and Family

The project's diagnosis works across three linked scales. In the city, the irregular fabric of the medina gives way to standardized blocks and isolated buildings. In the house, the courtyard dwelling turns into the enclosed apartment. In the family, several generations under one roof become smaller, separated households. The consequence the project identifies is sharp: older residents lose not only proximity to relatives but the everyday social networks that once carried them.

The collages answer that loss at eye level. A narrow earthen passage holds a woman cooking and an elder with a cup; an earthen corridor opens onto bedrooms while two men sit at a table among lanterns. These are not grand public spaces. They are thresholds where domestic routine spills into shared ground, which is precisely the kind of space apartment living erased. The scheme reconstructs collective life without copying the historic city literally.

An 85:15 Ratio Built on Exchange, Not Dependency

The social engine of the proposal is an unusual ratio: roughly 85 percent of residents are elders and 15 percent are younger people. The young are not treated as filler tenants. They join the community in exchange for time, companionship and care, while elders offer stories, skills, cultural education and lived experience. The relationship is reciprocal by design.

The courtyard collage makes that exchange tangible. A long wooden table, oud instruments resting nearby and an elderly couple walking past suggest a space equally suited to a meal, a music lesson or an afternoon stroll. Here older residents appear as teachers, craftspeople, storytellers and neighbors rather than passive recipients of care, and the architecture's role is to keep putting the two generations in each other's path.

The Courtyard as Social Infrastructure

The section is where the riad stops being an image and becomes a working diagram. It cuts through private rooms, a stair and an arcaded hall, with figures in robes occupying the upper level and a pink-toned basement below. Reading vertically, you see how intimate spaces, shared halls and circulation are stacked and stitched together, so moving between floors becomes another occasion for encounter.

This is the project's most persuasive move. Courtyards, circulation spaces, markets, workshops, gardens and shared rooms are all deployed as points of repeated contact. Instead of a corridor that only connects doors, the plan builds a sequence of rooms where conversation is the default rather than the exception.

Clustered Volumes Beneath a Crescent Moon

The closing poster pulls the argument into a single frame: stacked white courtyard volumes among palms under a red crescent moon, a section drawing and two seated elders. The clustered massing recalls the density of the medina without reproducing its irregular streets, and the paired imagery of building and people reinforces the proposal's insistence that form and social life are designed together.

The composition also points to the project's broader ambition, a shared cultural economy in which markets, crafts and gardens give the community reasons to gather beyond care. Clustered dwellings, shaded communal spaces and cultural activities are reinterpreted as the conditions for active aging rather than as decoration.

Why This Project Matters

Riyadh For All reframes aging as a design question about networks rather than facilities. By tracing the decline of multigenerational life across city, house and family, it locates the problem in spatial change, and it proposes a spatial answer: bring back the courtyard as a place where generations meet daily, not on scheduled visits.

The 85:15 ratio is the provocation worth taking seriously. It refuses the binary of segregated senior homes versus mixed housing that ignores elders, and instead tests what a community organized around older people's knowledge might look like. Whether or not the exact ratio holds up in practice, the idea that care and cultural exchange can be built into circulation, courtyards and markets is a useful lesson for any city confronting both an aging population and shrinking households.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Ketki Mahadik

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Project credits: Riyadh For All by Ketki Mahadik Co-Life (uni.xyz).