Inspired by Shajay Bhooshan, Alicia Nahmad Vasquez, Theodore Spyropoulos, and Aldo Van Eyck, we research ways to re-establish the connection between urban planning and housing which has been lost in modern cities for decades, if not centuries.
We propose a co-living system where users negotiate their boundaries through game. The dynamic user interactions shape the house, which shape each block, and block by block reshape the entire city. Home becomes a micro-city, and city becomes a huge house.
A user can enter the game to generate and manipulate his/her own surrounding. The user gets to make his/her own decisions about what to share, who to share with, or not to share at all. The users will get to make decisions for the composition of their own house as well as negotiate their boundary within the network, both physically and socially. These units accumulate to form an entire block. Hence, the block is no longer a static entity, but one which keeps evolving dynamically, growing or shrinking according to the input of the users. This process will bridge the gap between mass customisation of the block and the user, making each block unique and dynamic.
Historically, top-down prescription to urban housing has resulted in dry, monotonous masterplans which treat all individuals as equal variables for calculation and are callous to the social changes. Hence, most of today’s cities including London fails to reflect the needs or wants of the inhabitants, with the outdated formulas of the past. Without room for adjustments, the city subdivides in an unhealthy manner within a caged framework, resulting in tiny rooms of poor quality. The habitants of the city stay impotent, unable to alter their environment due to regulations and laws forbidding them to do so.
As a response, we tried to experiment and find out how much of the design decisions could be made bottom-up, in order to restore and empower the habitants of the city in making their own decisions regarding their own houses. Through our simulations in the game, we discovered that a complete bottom-up approach without any rules or regulations results in individuals pursuing self-interests which harm the overall benefit of the community. Where as with a certain amount of restriction and rules imposed, both the individuals and the community could benefit from sharing spaces. Extending this framework, the house to urban block relationship is re-defined in a way that units of individuals or families come together to form a community, which will shape the block, and ultimately reshape the city. Ultimately, we try to discover a healthy balance of top-down regulation and bottom-up approach.
In order to make this vision feasible, we are researching masonry construction with self-registration characteristics. These brick units can be assembled by mobile robot fabrication units or by human labour. By having bricks which can corbel and drystack,

In this city, which draws its strength from its history and claims to shape the future with this power, İZTO stands out with a special mission as an organization that is competent to bring these forces together in line with common goals and a vision that will lead the era. The Izmir Innovation Center Project is a project that emphasizes the important qualities of Izmir, sets new goals based on these, but also aims to pave the way for the development of age-specific values ​​such as innovation that need improvement in Izmir.

It is aimed that the architectural solutions of the building that will lead this visionary project are also innovative and sustainable. It is aimed to get maximum sunlight into the structure located on the east-west axis. By removing the existing reinforced concrete sunshades; Glass vertical sunshades are designed that are lighter and more mobile and will also cut the east and west light. On both facades, 'light shelves' have been placed to allow daylight to be brought into office spaces. Currently, the upper surfaces of the ventilation ducts are covered with reflective materials and transformed into a light shelf. The vents are opened from the upper floor of Fablab, which was solved on the basement floor, allowing daylight to reach the basement floor. The elements on the ceiling of the existing gallery space have been reinterpreted and their diameters and lengths have been increased. In order to transmit the daylight coming from the gallery space to the lower floors at maximum, it is envisaged to be manufactured from materials with reflective surfaces such as mirrors and glass.

​the whole structure can be assembled with little to no formwork on site, thus saving time, effort, material involved in construction, and labour cost.
We propose a game based approach to enable a flexible and responsive connection between the social dynamics of the users and the actual architecture. Furthermore, gamification of the urban housing can make community building more fun and engaging for all the parties involved. The game is developed in such a way that the users can participate through their SNS network account. This helps the users take advantage of his/her network of friends, and enable the system to suggest a list of compatible flatmates. Each player chooses their interests and preferences, which are reflected in the clustering of the small communities that will share the spaces. Multiple players can simultaneously play and observe how their community is built virtually via augmented reality game, making the experience more interactive, participatory, and informative. With the information of their neighbours’ preferences in plain sight, users can interact better with each other, and build more compatible community groups. The players will be able to overlay the results of their gameplay onto the reality before the physical construction takes place, and make informed decisions based on environmental factors of the site. AR enables players to project the potential outcome of their gameplay onto the real site. By doing so, it brings these visions closer to reality. By enabling AR on multiple mobile devices, players can share the content being displayed and interact simultaneously while the gameplay is going on - instead of being cut off from reality with goggles and headphones. As players (inhabitants) engage with the system, community will evolve out of gameplay. The social dynamics is married with the physical from house-scale to block scale.
Machine Learning is utilised to have a clear insight into how the structures and blocks can be reconfigured to better suit the inhabitants’ needs. With the analysis data of t-SNE, the users will have a better understanding of their community and be able to find compatible flatmates easily while having visual clarity of how their communal areas should be programmed. T-SNE is a technique to explore the clusterability of subjects in multidimensional space by calculating feature similarity and dimensionality reduction. We use this as a brief generator to help us make sense of community preferences and connect it directly to design. This will also help the residents to locate and group with a cluster which they prefer, allowing them to take full advantage of communal areas and shared spaces in our co-living system.
All in all, we are pursuing new methods to visualise and explore how urban housing situation in London can be improved. These methods are AR visualisation of gameplay connected with social dynamics of the inhabitants, while adopting machine learning to provide insight for the players - which becomes part of the design process and as a feedback device. We are using these methods at an urban scale in order to explore how urban planning itself can be rethought, while looking for answers to improve the housing crisis of London.