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Commendation

The Mothers of Gingerbread

Part 1 Project 2020
Kate Buurman
Newcastle University | UK
Do you think our cities are designed with women and children in mind?

Our current urban environment remains fundamentally ‘MAN’-made, reflecting gender-based discrimination, present across wider society. In response, The Mothers of Gingerbread provides six affordable homes for women and children, a daycare and a communal kitchen, creating a community which celebrates the mundane and manifests female empowerment.

Collage became a key tool in developing my project. It allowed me to create quick Dadaist visuals of key themes and ideas, as well as becoming a tool to design spatially. I formed my initial spatial arrangements in an aleatory, yet non-aleatory manner. I followed a process of tracing, reorganising and retracing forms from previously made collages, whilst utilising feminist theory on design to create women and child-friendly spaces.

The Mothers of Gingerbread is located on the periphery of Liverpool’s Baltic Triangle, which is undergoing a process of regeneration, prioritising the construction of new high-rise, standardised and so-called luxury apartment blocks over existing communities. The Mothers of Gingerbread aims to provide an example of an alternative future for former industrial sites which are undergoing gentrification, demonstrating how to reconnect and strengthen communities.

Kate Buurman

Tutor(s)


2020
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