The Street of Life: Elderly Co-Living Organised Around the Social Life of the Moroccan Street

Most elderly housing is designed around care routines: corridors sized for wheelchairs, rooms arranged for staff, common areas scheduled for activities. The Street of Life starts from a different premise. Its designers argue that the street is both a container of city life and a free public space with practical significance, and they make that observation the organising principle of an entire co-living community. Older residents here are not housed away from the rhythm of the city. They live along a street, with its shops, courtyards, terraces and places of worship, and they take part in it.

The project was developed by Fu Zheng, XueLu ZHANG and bin chen of Zhejiang University of Technology. It was named a Runner-up in the Co-Life competition on uni.xyz. The site is in Temara, Morocco, at the junction of Avenue Mohammed V and Avenue Moulay Rachid. The team treats senior living as the making of a social environment rather than as a collection of accessible apartments.

Designing for Dignity Before Designing for Mobility

The team's research looks past ramps, lifts and clinical facilities. It sets out what older residents need physiologically, psychologically and socially: independence and freedom, recognition of dignity and self-worth, fresh air and physical activity, enjoyment, and chances to talk with other people. These priorities produce a neighbourhood programme. Residents can walk outside, meet familiar faces, tend plants, make handicrafts, visit shops, attend religious spaces and spend time in courtyards.

The most considered move is the graded sequence of private, semi-private, communal and public spaces. Nobody is pushed into constant collective activity. Each resident decides how much contact they want and when. Co-living schemes often get this calibration wrong: forced sociability can isolate people as effectively as a closed door. In this proposal, the architecture becomes infrastructure for daily participation, and residents choose whether to take part.

A Vocabulary Borrowed From Temara's Streets

The designers did not import a generic architectural language. They studied how Moroccan urban space works and pulled out a set of recognisable parts: courtyards, shops, terraces, corridors, narrow passages, towers, mosques, stairs, arched openings, planting spaces and streets. These parts are then reassembled into a new plan. The boards connect this vocabulary to its cultural sources, including the Mediterranean climate, Islamic religious practice, traditional handicrafts, markets, social gathering and courtyard living.

The material palette carries the argument. It uses soft pink surfaces, blue openings, shaded passages, arches, planted terraces and layered pedestrian routes. These choices make the complex read as a fragment of a town rather than as an institution. That matters for people entering a new stage of life, who are more likely to feel at home in surroundings they already recognise.

The Riad as a Model for Shared Living

The project's most important precedent is the riad, the traditional Moroccan courtyard house. It suits elderly co-living well. A riad turns a protected interior courtyard into the shared centre of domestic life, so privacy and togetherness are arranged around one open-air heart.

Applied across the scheme, the courtyard balances the public energy of the street. A resident can step from the lively shared route into a quieter enclosed space without leaving the community. This mirrors the gradient from public to private that defines the social programme.

From Seed Plan to First Phase

The final board puts the system on one sheet. A pink housing elevation sits above coloured seed-plan diagrams, a unit plan and a long first-phase floor plan, all under a pale sun. Taken together, the drawings show the design as a set of rules rather than a fixed object. The seed diagrams set out a basic arrangement of spaces, and the first-phase plan shows that arrangement extended along a continuous route.

This phased logic suits the street metaphor. Real streets grow over time, plot by plot, and a community built in stages can mature in the same way. Reading the unit plan next to the long floor plan helps clarify the project's scale. The private dwelling stays modest, and generosity is invested in the shared spaces that connect the dwellings.

Why This Project Matters

The Street of Life changes the question elderly housing usually asks. Instead of asking how to look after older people, it asks how they can keep living in the city on their own terms. By borrowing the street, the market and the riad, the designers give residents roles: shopper, neighbour, gardener, craftsperson, worshipper. Each of these keeps a person visible and connected.

The proposal also shows that cultural specificity can be a functional tool and not just decoration. The arches, courtyards and pink walls of Temara are not simply references to Moroccan style. They are spatial habits that already support gathering, shade and gradual movement between public and private life. As populations age around the world, that lesson applies beyond Morocco: the best housing for older people may be built from the places they have always known.

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Project credits: The Street of Life: Co-Living for Elderly Co-Life (uni.xyz).