Périphériques’ affordable housing proposal reinvents Paris through “crowd building”

This design for a residential neighborhood in Paris is a megastructure made up of stacked smaller blocks which would be developed by local residents through "crowd building".

Périphériques Architectes designed the proposal as a way of making the French capital affordable again by putting the power of building into the hand of residents. Although the design was not selected by the jury of the Reinventer Paris competition, the project poses interesting questions relating to citizen-driven housing development and crowd funding in architecture.The French architects designed the proposal for a plot in the Paris Rive Gauche urban development zone, one of the 23 sites of the Reinventer Paris project. The project would allow local residents to put together funds to create their own development in a city where rents are too high for both owners and tenants.

Périphériques envisioned a prototype for such development and visualized a structure as a huge agglomeration made up of different sizes, types and styles of building. The design doesn’t represent a final solution, but aims to demonstrate how a building can combine various types of housing and mixed-use spaces, with varying rates and levels of accessibility.

Among the winning proposals are XTU Architectes’ plant-covered housing development, as well as projects by Sou Fujimoto and Manal Rachdi OXO Architects, David Chipperfield, and Manuelle Gautrand.