Community Architecture

Community architecture is the practice of designing buildings and neighbourhoods with the people who will live in and use them, rather than for them. Residents help set the brief, shape the plan and, in many projects, build, manage or extend the result themselves. The architect becomes an enabler and a translator as much as an author.

What is community architecture?

The term describes a way of working more than a building type. A community architecture project can be a housing estate, a school, a market hall or a single shared room, and what makes it one is the process: the people affected by a building take part in the decisions that produce it. In Britain the phrase is closely tied to Rod Hackney, a later president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who is described as the pioneer of "Community Architecture" in 1974, when he fought slum clearances in Macclesfield and helped local people improve their own surroundings.

Three ideas sit underneath almost every project in this field. First, users hold knowledge that designers do not, about daily routines, local politics, materials and money. Second, control matters: a household that can decide, build and change its home tends to look after it. Third, a building is never finished on handover; it keeps being adapted by the people who own it.

Residents often judge the architect on exactly this point: whether anyone listened before drawing.

"Assemble are the only ones who have ever sat and listened to the residents, and then translated their vision into drawings and models, and now into reality."

Erika Rushton, Chair of Granby Four Streets Community Land Trust

Community architecture overlaps with several neighbouring subjects without being the same thing. Community spaces names the places people share, such as halls, courtyards and gardens, whoever designed them. Community living covers ways of sharing a home, from co-housing to communes. Social housing is a tenure and a funding model. A social housing estate drawn entirely in a council office is not community architecture, while a small self-built terrace on a donated plot can be. The difference lies in who holds the pen, and when.

A short history of community architecture

The movement grew out of a reaction against post-war slum clearance and mass housing, when whole districts were demolished and rebuilt with little say from the people who lived there. Its early thinkers looked closely at what residents achieved on their own.

The British architect John F. C. Turner worked in Peru from 1957 to 1965, in Arequipa and then Lima, at a time when informal settlements known as barriadas were forming on the edges of cities as people claimed land and built basic homes themselves. His writing on self-help housing, including Housing by People (1976), has led him to be described as the most influential post-war writer on housing in the developing world, and in 1988 he received the Right Livelihood Award for "championing the rights of people to build, manage and sustain their own shelter and communities".

In Newcastle upon Tyne, Ralph Erskine's Byker redevelopment showed what consultation could look like at the scale of a council estate. Design began in 1968 and construction ran from 1969 to 1982, and the architects opened an office on site to develop communication and trust with existing residents. The same source records a hard lesson: fewer than 20 percent of the original local residents were eventually housed at the Byker Wall.

In London, Walter Segal developed a timber frame method light and simple enough to be built with minimal experience, avoiding wet trades such as bricklaying and plastering. In the 1970s Lewisham Borough Council made small sites, unsuitable for mainstream housing, available for people to build their own homes with it.

The approach has since gained its highest recognition. Diébédo Francis Kéré's first building, the primary school in his home village of Gando in Burkina Faso (2001), was built by and for the people of Gando, and in 2022 he received the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

Key principles of community architecture

Start with listening, not drawing

Participation only means something if it happens before the important decisions are fixed. Good projects begin with time on site, interviews, mapping and workshops, and they record what residents say in a form that shapes the brief. On uni.xyz, (pr)OpenCity by Shaurya Chauhan frames this as "open-sourcing" design, with the architect mediating between "the user" and "the urban".

Build with what the community can handle

Segal's lesson still applies: if a construction system is simple, dry and light, the people who need the building can help make it, and later repair and extend it. That means bolted joints over specialist welding, local materials over imported ones, and components that two people can lift.

Design for dignity and belonging

Community architecture often serves people the market overlooks: migrant workers, refugees, elders, children without parents. Here the principle is that shared space and visible care are not extras but the main programme.

"They build our cities, yet live without a place in them."

Pranjal Tak, project statement for AABHAS, a sense of home (UnIATA '25)

Use local knowledge and materials

Materials that a community already knows how to cut, join and repair are cheaper to maintain and easier to own. They also carry cultural meaning. Climate, flood patterns and seasonal routines are understood best by the people who live with them.

Plan for change and ownership

A participatory project should leave behind the tools to keep deciding: a residents' association, a land trust, a maintenance fund, or simply a plan that can grow. Incremental schemes that start with a core and let families add to it make this principle physical.

Community architecture on uni.xyz

Members of uni.xyz have explored this approach through competition entries, theses and editorial journals. The selection below shows the range, from shelters and co-living for elders to civic roofs and self-built playgrounds.

TERRACED SCAPES by Herriot Watt University is the most liked project in this topic. Entered in the Huddle competition, it proposes accessible garden spaces that "add life to elderly" residents, using terraced landscapes as places for gardening and meeting.

Hamlet by Atousa Esmaeili and Amirhossein Heydarpour, a winning entry in The SafeHouse competition, rejects the institutional orphanage. The team describes it as "a village for orphans", a place where children can learn from each other and build a community. In the same competition, HE[x]AL by Christopher Chua Yan Jun, Abhilash Mohan, Nabila Fatharani Azka and Yifan Goh, an Editor's Choice, proposes a transitional home for homeless teenagers in Jackson, Mississippi, built around trust, dignity and ability.

Kushaaneh, a girl who strives by dharmik thakkar, Arun Biswanath, Manan Jain, Saurav Bisht and Studio 504, entered in the Resile competition, is a resilience centre for Qandahar, Afghanistan. Its boards organise homes into small, inward-looking micro-clusters with courtyards at pedestrian scale.

Communal Resilience, from the HEAL+ competition, describes a community's combined ability to use locally available materials to "fight, withstand and recover" from disaster, so that living together becomes the preferred choice when a calamity hits.

Shaurya Chauhan's work appears twice: (pr)OpenCity received a People's Choice Award in Habitats '20, and prOpencity: Where the Common Man Presides was named Best in Region in UnIATA '21, carrying the same collaborative method to a user-centric approach for the densifying city.

The journals add built precedents. Villas de San Pablo Cultural Center in Barranquilla, led by Hubert Klumpner and Diego Ceresuela-Wiesmann with Alejandro Restrepo Montoya, came out of a seven-year process that included participatory workshops and a built prototype, and most of its floor area stays open, shaded and free to enter. In Austin, ECC Creative by A Parallel Architecture was shaped by open community forums, and Hispanic-American artists restored a Cesar Chavez mural on its concrete walls. Connect by Marwa Al-Saqqar, an Editor's Choice in Re-imagining Play 2020, treats the building of a playground in the refugee camp on Samos as play in itself, with children and community members assembling poles, ropes and reclaimed crates.

Challenges and future directions

Participation is easy to promise and hard to deliver. Consultation can become a box-ticking exercise held after the real decisions are made. Communities are not single voices, and the loudest residents are not always the most affected. Long processes cost money that small clients rarely have, and the Byker figures show that even careful engagement does not guarantee that the original community stays.

The approach is also being renewed. In Liverpool, the collective Assemble worked with residents of the Granby Four Streets, a set of Victorian terraces, and won the 2015 Turner Prize, the first time it went to a group or collective. Residents had formed a Community Land Trust in 2011 and bought empty houses on Cairns Street for £1 each before restoring them, as Wikipedia's account of the Granby Four Streets records.

"The jury has awarded the prize to Assemble who work in tandem with communities to realise a ground up approach to regeneration, city planning and development in opposition to corporate gentrification."

Turner Prize 2015 jury, Tate press release (2015)

Land trusts like Granby's suggest one future: communities that own the ground under their buildings and can keep deciding what happens there. The open question is scale, and how to keep a process personal when the brief is thousands of homes.

Community architecture for students and designers

For a thesis, community architecture rewards fieldwork. Pick a real group with a real problem, such as a market that is being cleared, a settlement facing relocation or an estate due for regeneration, and make the participation method part of the design. Strong angles include incremental housing, self-build construction kits, shared infrastructure for elders or refugees, and the repair of buildings a community already loves. Show your process on the boards: who you spoke to, what changed because of it, and how residents could keep changing the building after you leave.

Open design competitions on uni.xyz often ask for exactly this kind of social brief. Related topics worth reading include community-driven architecture and co-housing.

Frequently asked questions

What is community architecture in simple terms?

It is architecture made with the people who will use it. Residents take part in setting the brief and making design decisions, and sometimes in building and managing the result. The architect works as an enabler rather than a distant author.

Who started the community architecture movement?

No single person founded it. John F. C. Turner's work on self-help housing, Walter Segal's self-build method and Ralph Erskine's on-site office at Byker were early milestones, and Rod Hackney is credited as the pioneer of the term in Britain after his work in Macclesfield in 1974.

How is community architecture different from social housing?

Social housing describes who owns and pays for homes. Community architecture describes how a building is designed and who decides. A social housing scheme can be participatory, but many are not, and community architecture also covers schools, halls, markets and public space.

What are good examples of community architecture?

Well-known examples include the Byker redevelopment in Newcastle, the Segal self-build houses in Lewisham, Francis Kéré's school in Gando and Assemble's work in the Granby Four Streets in Liverpool. On uni.xyz, the journal on the Villas de San Pablo Cultural Center describes a recent participatory project in Colombia.

What skills does a community architect need?

Beyond design, the role needs listening, facilitation and the ability to explain drawings to people who do not read them. Knowledge of simple construction, funding and local planning rules helps residents turn ideas into buildings they can afford and maintain.

References and further reading

• Rod Hackney, Wikipedia
• John F. C. Turner, Wikipedia
• Byker Wall, Wikipedia
• Walter Segal, Wikipedia
• Diébédo Francis Kéré, 2022 Laureate, The Pritzker Architecture Prize
• Assemble wins the Turner Prize 2015, Tate
• Granby Four Streets, Wikipedia