SUQ: Reworking the Souq Into a Shortlisted Model for Intergenerational Housing in Temara

Most housing for older people is designed as a retreat: a quiet compound set apart from traffic, commerce and the noise of other generations. SUQ starts from the opposite premise. It borrows the logic of the traditional souq, a dense web of narrow streets where trade and conversation overlap, and uses it to keep elderly residents threaded into the everyday city. The result is a housing proposal that treats age less as a condition requiring shelter and more as a stage of life that still needs streets, neighbours and errands.

Designed by Ondřej Slunečko and shortlisted in the Co-Life competition, the project sits in Temara, part of the Rabat-Salé-Témara conurbation in Morocco. Temara is a suburban landscape of scattered amenities and no single dominant centre. Slunečko does not respond with a gated enclave. He proposes a porous micro-city organised around two primary axes, four phased neighbourhoods and a central oasis, where living, working and socialising sit within walking distance of one another.

Domestic Rooms Built for Company

The interior render sets the tone before any plan does. A timber-lined living room, black kitchen cabinetry and a long dining table frame a scene of elderly residents, a carer and a dog sharing the same warm space. Nothing here reads as clinical. Care arrives as part of the household rather than as an institutional overlay, which is exactly the shift the project argues for.

That domestic warmth matters most in the collective dwellings. Slunečko's Type B units are inward-oriented homes for groups of four to six people, built around shared living to counter loneliness and encourage mutual support. The table at the centre of the image is doing real social work: it is where a group of older residents becomes a household.

Two Typologies Under Planted Roofs

The two sections show how the scheme gives residents a choice about how much company they keep. The first, a gabled single-storey unit with a kitchen, bathroom and living space under a planted roof, has the compact, self-contained scale of the outward-facing Type A dwellings intended for individuals or couples who want autonomy. The second is a two-storey block beneath a sloping green roof, with residents cooking, reclining and greeting a dog across both floors, a section that conveys the busier rhythm of shared life.

In both drawings the green roof is the constant. Together with narrow alleys and shaded pathways, it forms part of a climate strategy drawn from desert settlements, using vegetation and shade to cut heat gain rather than relying on mechanical cooling. The pairing is smart: offering independence and collectivity side by side lets residents move between typologies as their needs change, without leaving the neighbourhood that knows them.

An Oasis at the Centre of the Plan

At 1:1000, the site plan shows the souq idea at urban scale. Clusters of faceted roofs gather beside a curving pond and a network of paths, set against surrounding streets and dry ground. The contrast is deliberate: the water and planting at the core act as a cooling, sensory centre, while the clustered buildings form the narrow, shaded passages that give the scheme its name. This water-sensitive landscape is the project's answer to Temara's lack of a centre, providing multiple localised hubs instead of a single civic focus.

The plan also explains the phasing. The development is split into four neighbourhoods, each able to function independently while remaining connected, so the scheme can grow gradually without losing coherence. Ground floors along the main axis hold shops, workshops and community services, and informal alleys between dwellings create semi-private ground for chance encounters. Residents belong to a small, recognisable cluster first and to the wider district second.

Why This Project Matters

SUQ treats social isolation as a spatial problem with spatial answers. Rather than adding activities to an inward-looking care facility, Slunečko places elderly housing directly on routes where people shop, work and pass by, and then softens those routes with shade, water and alleys scaled for lingering. The souq gives him a tested urban pattern for density and exchange, and he applies it with restraint instead of nostalgia.

The proposal is most convincing where its ideas overlap: the climate logic that produces narrow alleys also produces neighbourly ones, and the oasis that cools the site also gives it a heart. As cities across the region grow outward and older residents risk being left on the margins, SUQ offers a clear model for intergenerational living that is rooted in local typology and grounded in daily life.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Ondřej Slunečko

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Project credits: SUQ by Ondřej Slunečko Co-Life (uni.xyz).