The Social Ring: A Moroccan Settlement Model That Treats Senior Housing as a Living Village

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This article was written by UNI Editorial and published on uni.xyz, a platform for design professionals and creative thinkers.

Q: What is "The Social Ring: A Moroccan Settlement Model That Treats Senior Housing as a Living Village" about?

This article covers topics related to Community Architecture, Ageing-Well Design, Senior Living, Youth Architecture, Sustainable Architecture, Conceptual Architecture, Architecture. Narthana Renganathan traces an older settlement's paths to weave housing, farmland, courts and squares into an elderly community within one outer ring.

Narthana Renganathan traces an older settlement's paths to weave housing, farmland, courts and squares into an elderly community within one outer ring.

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UNI Editorial published Results under Community Architecture, Ageing-Well Design on Aug 25, 2026

Most senior housing is designed around a corridor: a clean, accessible line that delivers residents to rooms, dining halls and treatment spaces, and then delivers nothing else. The Social Ring starts from the opposite premise. It asks what would happen if a home for older people behaved like a settlement instead of an institution, with alleys to linger in, courts to gather around, land to cultivate and a square to walk toward. The answer is a compact community where isolation is addressed through the shape of the ground plan rather than through a schedule of activities.

Designed by Narthana Renganathan and recognised as a Shortlisted entry in the Co-Life competition, the project frames ageing as a social and economic problem as much as a medical one. Retirement, reduced mobility, financial dependency and changing family structures can gradually sever older people from the networks that once shaped their days. Set within a Moroccan settlement context, the proposal answers by interlocking housing, agriculture, amenities, work, recreation and public life, treating elderly residents as participants in community life rather than recipients of care.

Narrow Lanes and Bridges as Social Infrastructure

Narrow passage between rust-colored walls beneath a gray bridge walkway, with an elderly woman in a pink shawl walking toward the viewer

Rendered lane between rust-colored walls with two women in saris talking under a flat gray sky

The first two views establish the project's most persuasive move: circulation is the programme. An elderly woman walks a tight passage between rust-coloured walls while a grey bridge walkway passes overhead; in the next lane, two women stop mid-route to talk. Neither space is labelled as social, yet both are. The tight section keeps walls close enough to offer shade and a sense of enclosure, and the bridge adds a second layer of movement, so the lane below always has the possibility of a passerby above.

This matters for older residents because the trip between destinations becomes an event in itself. Streets, thresholds and shaded edges create reasons to pause, observe and converse, which is exactly the low-stakes contact that institutional corridors tend to eliminate. The designer describes this as using circulation as social infrastructure, and the renderings make the claim tangible.

Timber Thresholds Where Domestic Life Spills Out

Rendered alley with louvered timber doors, a seated woman weaving baskets and a figure crossing the bridge above

Louvered timber doors line this alley, and in front of them a seated woman weaves baskets while another figure crosses the bridge above. The image quietly argues for the edge between private dwelling and shared lane as a productive zone. The louvers filter light and view, letting residents retreat behind them when needed while remaining within earshot of the street. Placing handwork at the doorstep connects to the project's interest in work as part of later life, and it reflects the brief's central balance: privacy on demand, contact always within reach.

A Public Square That Draws the Settlement Together

Collage of musicians and seated singers on a gray plaza before white and rust-colored buildings with vertical panels

At the largest scale of interaction sits the public square, shown here as a grey plaza animated by musicians and seated singers against white and rust-coloured buildings with vertical panels. The collage is deliberately festive, and it completes a hierarchy that runs from a neighbouring household to a shaded alley, a courtyard, shared amenities and finally this open civic floor. Older residents are positioned as audience and performers alike, part of a public life that extends beyond the walls of a care setting.

An Outer Ring Traced From an Earlier Settlement

Aerial massing model of white courtyard blocks with green-edged roofs, orange stair ramps and small figures on paths

The aerial massing model reveals the logic behind the lanes. Rather than imposing an abstract grid, the masterplan traces routes and paths from an earlier settlement pattern and translates them into a new hierarchy of streets and pedestrian connections. A continuous outer ring sets the boundary and ties the community together, while smaller pathways weave between white courtyard blocks topped with green-edged roofs. Orange stair ramps stand out as vertical connectors, linking ground-level paths to the elevated walkways seen in the street views.

The resulting plan reads closer to an organically grown neighbourhood than a campus. Housing clusters, courts, amenities and farmland overlap through short walking distances instead of sitting in separated functional zones, and the designer's circular access diagrams map communal spaces within comfortable reach of each residential area. For people with reduced mobility, that proximity is the difference between encountering social life daily and encountering it rarely.

Cultivated Courts and Shaded Pergolas

Rendered courtyard planted with tall grass where two women work with hoes beside rust-colored walls and a timber pergola

Rendering of a narrow lane between terracotta-colored blocks with timber louvered shutters, a pergola, a grass patch and two seated men in shade

Agriculture enters the settlement at the scale of the courtyard. In one view, two women work the ground with hoes among tall grass beside rust-coloured walls and a timber pergola; in another, two men sit in the shade of a narrow lane where a pergola and a patch of grass soften terracotta-coloured blocks fitted with louvered shutters. Cultivation here is not relegated to a distant allotment but woven into the daily path, giving residents a purposeful activity that sits alongside rest.

The repeated pergolas and shutters form a consistent climatic vocabulary of shade, filtered light and partial enclosure. Together with the earthy wall palette, they ground the proposal in its warm-climate setting and make the outdoor rooms habitable for long stretches of the day, which is essential if the lanes and courts are to do the social work the plan assigns them.

Why This Project Matters

The Social Ring shifts the question of senior housing from how to care for older people to how to keep them embedded in a community. Its strength lies in the conviction that isolation is partly a spatial condition, produced by long corridors, separated zones and destinations that are too far away. By borrowing the paths of an earlier settlement and layering scales of interaction from doorstep to square, the project makes encounter the default rather than the exception.

There is also a broader lesson in the method. Tracing inherited routes instead of drawing on a blank grid gives the plan an irregular, lived-in character and roots it in local patterns of movement. For a typology that often defaults to clinical efficiency, Narthana Renganathan's entry offers a reminder that dignity in later life can come from ordinary things: a shaded alley, a neighbour at the door, a plot to tend and a square within walking distance.