URBAN COLLECTIVE ⁴ : Making Collectivity Operational to Empower Inhabitants, Reduce Housing Costs, Design Adequate Dwellings, and Create Common Spaces

Urban Collective ⁴ seeks to claim, design, manage, and expand affordable housing within a framework of four intertwined collective domains: First, the collective committee acts as a democratic decision-making body that includes inhabitants and public representatives. Second, implementing a model of collective ownership and funding between the local government and individuals enables extraction of housing projects from the speculative market in perpetuity. Third, establishing collective design processes fosters adequate translations of inhabitants’ housing needs and facilitates continual reaction to changing circumstances. And fourth, considering collective spaces as an intrinsic part of both interior and exterior living environments ensures a persistent platform for exchange between the public and private, as well as individual and common activites. Offering a stark contrast to a current development scheme of an abandoned parking structure in Koreatown, this project offers an alternative proposal of how the Urban Collective ⁴ framework could reuse the parking structure and its site by creating a democratically operated, experimental, open-ended and community oriented urban intervention for affordable housing, as well as commercial and public activities.