Youth House Co-op(under Greater Manchester Housing Action) is a non-profit organization in Manchester, set up by formerly homeless young people who are working towards developing a community led housing scheme for other homeless and differently abled people.

With a severe lack of homes for people in need, community-led housing offers a real opportunity for people to come together to benefit from supportive and secure homes. The scheme would be designed around the needs of local people and built with the community, not profit, in mind.

Through collaboration with MSA, they desire to develop a replicable community led housing scheme and spread understanding of use of disabled adaptation grants and grants to their future practice, benefiting more disabled homeless young people who wait longer than any group for housing currently.

We will be working closely in collaboration with them during the action weeks and would be interacting with potential residents of the housing scheme to understand their experiences and desired outcomes for the project. We will also be working closely with an occupational therapist for disability access planning, carbon co op for insulation advice as well as a Fire safety consultant for the project.

MSA Live has officially begun!!

Day 01 - Meet the Client + The Big Draw

We began our day by meeting the BAs and introducing them to the project and the clients. Followed by this, we had a meeting with the client and the occupational therapist.

After the team understood the project and interacted with the clients, we started with our next activity - The Big Draw. We got to brainstorm different ideas in small groups to see how can we design an interesting master plan. We did this by using to-scale cutouts of module homes and placing them on site.

Looking forward to visiting the site tomorrow and the weeks ahead!

One step closer!

Day 07 - Finalising our design and client bio!

We carried on with the work from Day 06 and went into further detail while narrowing down the master plan. The group was split into two teams, one focusing on masterplan changes digitally and making the 3D Digital model. Our other group worked on site analysis drawings, text for the bio and precedent pages to put into our design document for the Youth house co-op.

Looking forward to finishing the document and presenting it to the clients on Day 10! The next steps are to further develop our design document, and finish our client bio document!