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Housing is a key area for race equality. There is a strong link between housing, poverty, and social cohesion faced by people from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds. When addressing the housing crisis, it is important to assess its origin and understand the needs of increasingly diverse populations and their neighbourhoods: There is no housing affordability without access to land.

This thesis advocates for cooperative living as an alternative response to the housing crisis. A co-operative is defined as an association of people who voluntarily come together to work towards a common economic, social, and cultural goal. The British Coop Movement originated in the 1800s and was developed out of the desire to do things differently and in a way that genuinely serves the community. Inspired by existing models of cooperative cities, like the Garden City movement by Howard, a deep exploration on centralised food preparation or communal cooking space within residential complexes was undertaken as a reasonable first step towards reducing domestic household work, abolishing gender segregation, and addressing food

The thesis began with an understanding of what a home is without a kitchen and interrogates contextual policies, philosophies, and principles that inform cooperative housing. Removing the kitchen from the dwelling creates an architecture of resistance. The negative reaction to removing the kitchen from the house highlights the preconceptions that the kitchen is intended to be a place where women bear sole responsibility for all household work. Hence, there is an opportunity to challenge its capacity to be reversed or modified. Could a kitchen-less home equitably distribute domestic labour in society rather than conceal it? And on what scale should designers attempt to organise housing units for socialised domestic work? The proposed thesis expounds on the concepts of thresholds, designing several overlapping internal and external shared spaces that allow for a variety of exchanges between the dwellers and the existing community like the communal kitchen, the allotment market, the courtyard and veranda.

The purpose of this design was to address the needs of ethnic communities residing in North Grangetown, Cardiff. Unlocking unrealized potential from the art of making and growing your own food, the strategy is based on the ‘extended home’: dispersing and aggregating the shared amenities found in each dwelling across a cluster of adaptable public spaces within a comfortable walking distance. From communal kitchens to markets, this project explores a prototype for a sustainable multigenerational living for a human-centred ‘kitchenless-city’ of the future.