Native is a new building program for residential space on high streets. This program challenges the typical build to rent building model, by providing a space where communities, tenants, and property developers can exchange information and design a better high street experience for all.
Breif: Repurposing the high street as retail and residential space
The Urban Village High Street
The Context
The high street is a source of livelihoods that have been deeply impacted by the rise of digital commerce, and change in consumer behaviors. We see businesses moving online, and stores becoming empty spaces. The building sector, supported by new regulations, sees the opportunity to repurpose these empty spaces into residential units. What will this future scenario look like? We partnered with UKAA, the organization for the UK Built to Rent sector, and together we created solutions for building, living, and shaping the future high streets of London.
Exploring Cities
Setting Cities Vision
Since the beginning we realized the complexity of this project because the high street is composed of many elements; there are shops, buildings, transportation, people, employees, regulations, culture, and lots more. Due to the complexity of it, we started exploring the bigger picture; the city. Because we worked from two different countries, field researches were both online and offline in our respective towns. Although distant, we both arrived at the realization that: “ if the cities vision is set, then we know what sort of high street we need and the building just naturally occurs”.
EXPERIENCING HIGH STREETS
We began our journey by conducting interviews with local people, community representatives, and officials to understand their general feelings and vision for the future of high streets. We were amazed at the emotional attachment they had towards their neighbourhood and their interest in protecting it. Each one described their high street to us as a living organism with its personality and interests. We realized that it was our duty to find a balance between preserving the uniqueness of these areas while facilitating the evolution of the city.
THE CHALLENGE
We discovered that typical construction work does not take into account the high street's uniqueness. The property developers tend to replicate the same building in other areas. We knew that this would create conflict between the property developers and the community, as the community sees the houses as a threat to the image of the high street in their heart. Additionally, this mismatch between building and location would have compromised the tenant experience.
This gave us an opportunity to design a new building model
OUR VISION OF A SHARED VOICE
Every community is endowed with a deep knowledge of its place. We believe that this information should be included in the design process of these residential buildings to reflect the environment in which they are located. But this information is challenging to gather and time-consuming. That's why we thought of creating reference groups composed of people from the community who can collect and share their take of the high street identity. Their voice will be the residential building's foundation, making them feel like part of the design process.
The Vision
Based on all this information, we created a vision for London projecting it in the future. We dreamt of a London, where each high street has a strong community and they have they their own identity which leads to creation of individual experiences on all those streets. For anybody who visits London, their lifetime shouldn’t be enough to experience such diverse experiences. Such is the London we see.
Our Journey
Project Partner
UKAA - the organisation for the UK Build To Rent sector, A member of the global alliance of the NAA (National Apartment Association of USA)