Foodscaping suburban housing: the role of communal growing for social cohesion and to reimagine the cultural mage of SubUrbia

This paper aims to study the conflicts that arise from the ever-present need for housing and urban expansion, with a primary focus on creating an identity for these communities on the edge. It studies the shifting paradigm of the suburban community and proposes to reimagine the image of suburbia to balance out urban encroachment on rural landscapes through foodscaping the architecture. Concepts of communal living and communal food growing are explored spatially using design as a research tool to better understand how foodscaping can create a sense of place and social cohesion. The capacity of design to bring people together and increase social cohesion is explored through architecture that encourages communal food growing. These ideas form a preface to help broaden views of sustainable suburban living. These hypotheses are explored at different scales: from the urban scale to the building fabric scale. This study reflects on how to make in-between spaces into places; thereby giving them an identity and further exploring the way people would interact within these places using food production as a mediator. Thereby reflecting on how design at the urban scale affects the architecture of a building and vice versa. Conclusively, communal living could provide the necessary platform where the boundaries between the urban form and the building create opportune spaces to harmoniously manoeuvre the hierarchy of the private-semi-public-communal spaces while addressing food security of its citizens.