This is a presentation for City and Complexity conference by MAAD student at the Welsh School of Architecture Asawari Dalvi I co-supervised with Tabitha Pope and Rowan McKay. The aim of this paper is 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.
This paper 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. Further, the influence that this social cohesion and greening of architecture to create a new suburban image is investigated. These ideas are be 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. This research reflects on how design at the urban scale can affect 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.

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