Gabriel Leung (he/him)

“People Make Glasgow’, a slogan you could see everywhere in a daily basis, indicating citizens and the city are related symbiotically. This thesis tries to tackle the on-going physical and mental health problem in Calton area, by creating a community hub catering different social programmes to encourage social interaction. As well as promoting urban farming and cooperating a music theatre to create harmonic and therapeutic experience.

People in the community need to change their outlook of life. Nowadays the hectic and stressful lifestyle in the cities has negative implications on a person’s mental health, COVID-19 have caused a great impact towards people’s daily life in Glasgow Economically and psychologically, they have self isolated themselves from the society by working from home and this affects people enormously. The Calton residential district is currently heavily barricated with vegetation barricates and fences, vacant and derelict land in-between housing complexes have created social fragmentation and caused problems to the general public’s health and welfare.

Therefore, a possible solution to this problem is to disconnect from the hectic rhythms of the city and break the spatial boundaries by enhancing the permeability of social interaction ground.

This thesis tries to create a new community neighbourhood as a catalyst to accelerate and inspire surrounding neighbourhood the use of public spaces and interventions, whilst creating different scale of social hub which helps reconnecting community from social fragmentation.

Through studies conducted during P2 district project, statistics shows whilst lone parents and unemployment are the most crucial issue in Calton Area, housing typologies in Calton district still remain rather inadequate and unsuitable, most housing units are targeted in larger families.

My solution thus, is to combine the surrounding context and the ideology of Urban Catalyst to create positive community space in the designated zone. Also providing
smaller scale dwelling and co-living – working environment to encourage social interaction in Calton district.

For the Cell project I have explored the topic of gender roles in Architecture. Since the idea of nuclear family became a main trend in the1950s, the strong sense of gender stereotype was embedded into our subconscious and since then people have started to assign ‘genders’ to different rooms in a house, and this creates an intangible boundary subconsciously in our mind of labour being masculine and domesticity including unpaid work to be feminine.

My approach to the flat design is currated with two principles, the gender neutral-ness in aesthetic property and the permeability of the space. The layout of the flat is currated in an open plan, the circulation is articulated around the central core which accomodates all the functional appliances such as bathroom / toilet, kitchen and laundry area.