Site:
Manchester Metropolitan University (MMU) own a 4.69 hectare site to the north of Longford Road, Chorlton. The current vehicle access to the site is from the junction of Longford Road with Ryebank Road, with further pedestrian access onto Ryebank Road to the north. In 2019, the University decided to sell the land to a suitable developer as part of its strategy to consolidate onto a single, sustainable, city campus. The University has now chosen a partnership between Step Places and Southway Housing Trust to develop the site who have shared their initial vision for a sustainable, community-led residential development for the land .

Social Impact：
The project is a part of the vision for Ryebank Fields, which is a proposed sustainable, socially and environmentally responsible, residential development. The proposed scheme aims to provide high-quality and affordable homes to meet the needs of the local community, as well as promoting community engagement through physical connections, walkable and accessible features, and the ambition to achieve biodiversity net gain. As for MSA Group 32’s age-friendly housing project, we will focus on three aspects of the big picture：

- Establish a community network to improve social connections

- Pay attention to aged people's physical and mental health by manipulating the residential environment

- Promote equality among different groups of people

Skills：
The skills you will learn or develop in the project UTOPI-AGE can be divided into three parts responding to the three project phases. During the stage of the previous research, we will be engaged with a client brief, site survey and precedent study. And the specific actions include brainstorming, diagramming, comprehensive macro site analysis and an age-friendly housing workshop. During the design exploration, we will mainly focus on the collaborative working mode in which we will develop our communication skills with our partners and relevant personnel. You will learn iteration skills in a method of physical collage to explore various possibilities. Coming to the final stage of visualization of outcomes, with the help of the team and your peers, you will learn and apply various software including Rhino, Grasshopper, Adobe Suite, AutoCAD, V-Ray, Lumion and so on. You will have a chance to study the whole working flow and gain some precious experience from our students.

We are happy to introduce our collaborator, Roxanne, an architect at 5plus Architects and a tutor of PRAXXIS Atelier in MSA. She has mainly worked in the public sector- which is where her interests in architecture are mainly focused- education, community and encouraging social encounters through design, colour and public space.

Name:
Ziyan Chen

Course:
B.Arch in Nanjing Tech University, China
M.Arch in Manchester School of Architecture, UK

Atelier:
Praxxis

Interests:
Gardening
Writing novels
Movies
Art

Skills:
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Indesign
AutoCAD
Lumion
SketchUp
Rhino
Grasshopper


Passion about:
Feminist architecture, AI-assisted architectural design, Narrative architecture

We are happy to introduce our collaborator, Katy, a senior consultant at Lexington, working to deliver stakeholder engagement, consultations and communications strategies for a range of property clients. She is a young professional with experience in the property, engineering, healthcare, and environment sectors.

We conducted a site visit in advance the day before the start of MSA Live to get a first glimpse of Ryebank Fields. This is an open and wild site surrounded by a peaceful and quiet community. We are looking forward to the upcoming Action Week to come up with some exciting ideas for this site!

We finally got to meet the BA students! In the morning we had a short introduction of ourselves and gave the BA students an overview of our collaborators, our community and our project.

After a short lunch break we had a case study. A big thank you to our group member Pragnya for presenting her design proposal for an ageing community undertaken at undergraduate level, which gave the group some understanding of the idea of creating an age-friendly community.

After the case study we divided the BA students into landscape and housing groups and each group had a half hour or so brainstorming session led by March students to sketch out some initial design ideas.

We invited Mark Hammond from the MSA To share his experience in relation to the age-friendly projects. We are excited that Mark has been able to provide some theoretical frameworks and case studies on age-friendly design to share. After the presentation we had an interesting discussion: imagine a day after we turn 75.

For the rest of the morning we used collage to visualise our design ideas. On the basis of the manifestio, we put together collages of what we wanted to achieve and what functions we could incorporate.

Today the landscape team is focusing on the general design. We started with a case study on age-friendly landscaping and drew functional bubble diagrams to determine what kind of landscape features we needed for our site, then we drew two different versions of the masterplan on a 1:1000 plan for options.

The housing group worked on the massing ideas to explore the form of the blocks and their arrangement responding to site survey and our concept.

A productive Friday spent working on the site model followed by preparations for the big day i.e. Monday for the special workshop organised within the campus with the community members to benefit from their experiences that could be useful design inputs for our project.

Preparations in progress for the big day progresses as we have reached the end of the first week of MSA Live with fulfillment.

We were very fortunate to have members of the Ryebank community join us for today's collage workshop event. Katy and Roxanne, our collaborators on this project, were also invited to the event.
After a short presentation to our guests about our ongoing projects, we had an enthusiastic discussion with them about what life is like for the over-55s.

In the second phase of the event, we used the model of the site and landscape element flags that had been prepared in advance. We invited guests to express what they would like the site to have by placing the different landscape flags in different positions on the model.
In addition to this, our guests fully expressed their expectations for the transformation of the site, which was of great benefit to our project for the following days.

After the workshop with community members we moved to the final stage of proposal design. Both the landscape team and the housing team are working on plans and collages for Thursday's presentation and Friday's assignment submission.

M.arch students had two drop-in sessions on Wednesday and Thursday, which BA students could choose to attend or complete their homework at home. During the sessions, M.arch students gave BA students advice on how to revise their collages and taught them some Photoshop skills.

We were honoured to have member of Southway Homes come and listen to our proposal presentation with our collaborators. After two days of drawing, we have completed the master plan and the landscapeand and architectural collages.
We are delighted to be able to share the output of our design and to exchange our views.

After two weeks of work, we have finally completed and submitted our project portfolio! Let's look forward to the summer holidays with great anticipation!