The systems that underpin cities

Architects must diversify the application of their skills towards a broader definition of architecture - one better equipped to deliver positive change for the most vulnerable in society.

Chris Hildrey is a London-based architect and designer who believes architects must diversify the application of their skills towards a broader definition of architecture - one better equipped to deliver positive change for the most vulnerable in society.

Hildrey Studio approach architecture in broader sense of the traditional practice. Not to pivot away from architecture, but to broaden the discipline of it, so that the education and the training received as architects can be applied in ways that may result in a building, but that it's not automatically assumed that the solution will result in a building - as ProxyAddress perfectly demonstrates.

“We do have building projects. One at the moment is a Grade 2 listed project in Westminster, London, which is actually refurbishing an old homeless shelter to be a more holistic centre for helping people with a wide range of traumas. But then it goes all the way through to projects like ProxyAddress where there is no physical building involved.”

Before establishing Hildrey Studio, he has previously worked at award-winning practices Foster & Partners, Zaha Hadid Architects and OMA, and was project architect of the Natural History Museum at Níall McLaughlin Architects.

Around studio projects, Hildrey is an Advisory Council Member for the Glasgow Alliance to End Homelessness, sits on the Transparency Task Force Special Interest Group for Governance, Culture, and Conduct, and is also involved with mentoring - helping support teens from disadvantaged backgrounds keen to study architecture.

Removing potential obstacles

Hildrey created ProxyAddress in 2018 - a social enterprise that gives people experiencing homelessness a fixed address - during his year in residence at the Design Museum. The project uses local data to provide homeless people with stable addresses in order to access vital services.

ProxyAddress examines the systems that underpin cities, such as addressing systems, and looks to intervene in the same way that an architect might intervene in the neighbourhood. The aim: to make the city more inclusive and accessible for those who are otherwise excluded by the systems that underpin the city. Not every [spatial] problem will or should result in a building and architects have a greater role than ever before in facilitating these solutions.

Identity vs Location

ProxyAddress is fundamentally pro-identity. ProxyAddress doesn't try and describe a location, it tries to describe a person. It it removes the location element from it. While other services say ‘let's make a location more accessible’ - essentially pro-location.

When you start to use an address as a de facto form of ID, what's important is the person, not the location. ProxyAddress is about how do we quickly define people. Describing location regardless of identity can be useful. For example, when engaging with emergency services in rural areas where there isn't an address or for identifying where you're going to meet a friend at a festival, in an open field.

What is ProxyAddress?

The system works by virtually duplicating existing addresses and allocating them to people lacking a stable home, enabling them to apply for jobs, bank accounts and social security among other essential services.

“Clients come to you with set expectations because you are known as an architect. And that’s why I describe myself as an architect and designer. I described my studio as a design studio because if I describe it as an architecture firm there will only be one expected output and one reason why clients approach.

What I would really like to see is that it it’s not actually constraining anyone when they use it as a title. It’s a protected term [”architect”] in terms of relevance to the construction industry but it’s not protected as widely used in industries such as tech. I remember when I went into the [broadly speaking] start-up world with ProxyAdress. I would speak to people and say I was an architect. The next question would always be:

’Oh, what type, data, systems, solution?’ ‘No, just a normal one…’”

The idea of of what an architect is, is widely embraced beyond architecture. Yet there is a world in which non-architecture industries seem to be more happy to embrace a broadening of what the term architecture means while architecture is really focused on protecting the title, even though it's function is already spreading out beyond.

Why did ProxyAddress come about?

“I came into the profession where a third of all architects were un- or underemployed. In 2010, austerity began and I started to see the effects of that over the next several years. I remember my local library being shut down. I remember local play park being closed. I remember walking through Liverpool One when that was open and thinking ‘there are no public toilets here’. If I want to use the toilet, I have to go buy a coffee and then I remembered that being the case almost everywhere.

All of a sudden where there were no more public toilets. I remember reading [at the time] that Newcastle had no public toilets which is crazy for a city of nearly 1 million people. Homelessness was also massively increasing.

Suddenly it’s like, well, you can’t use the loo, you can’t go to a library, you can’t send your kids to a playground, the land that the GLA is on has been sold off... It just seemed a bit absurd. All these things were shifting beneath our feet and it felt like it was a real shift in how cities were working.”

Hildrey continued to explain a trip to China in 2012:

“I remember seeing, in China, there was just much more provision for just dwelling in the public. There were open spaces where there would be dance classes for old people. There are people sitting down playing mahjong on on tables.

There was just a public life that seemed to be getting squeezed out of the UK. It felt like if you walked down the street someone’s going to tap you on the shoulder and go that would be £5. It felt like a subscription model to existing.

So I saw all this changing but I realised it wasn’t for us [architects] to be dealing with any of this. It felt like architects were just on the side-lines. You know, we’d been trained to understand the implications of what was happening, but we weren’t being given any agency to do anything about it.”

The Designer in Residence programme at the Design Museum became the vehicle to give Hildrye the space to really think about these issues. The most important part of the development was time spent travelling across the UK to understand the challenges to be addressed.

“And and that was the most important part of it. You can’t hope to understand somebody’s experience of homelessness or even the general trends of it just by reading statistics and looking at desktop studies.

When I started out, I thought it was exclusively about post and then I came to realise it’s about much more than just post. It’s about identity, essentially, and your social credentials.”

ProxyAddress helps people who are displaced.

This can be either through homelessness, people who escaped domestic violence, people who are leaving the foster care system, people who have left prison and it can be people who are sofa surfing, in temporary accommodation, or even people who are just about to be displaced if they are falling into rent arrears and they know that they're about to get evicted. Essentially, as people who tend to be in a position of some kind of trauma, they have this shared situation of instability and that instability takes away the ability for people to have a stable address and with that you lose your ability to engage in the services and support that you need at that time.

“We look at helping in all those cases by providing stable address details during that period of instability so that you can use it as you would a normal address to avoid stigma, to apply for jobs, to gain access to libraries, to get bank accounts, to get benefits, to access healthcare, all those kind of things that you need at that point.”

Instability is not itself an expected outcome of anyone's behaviour. It is a shared symptom of a broad array of causes.

“Most of us are far more insulated than others against homelessness because we have a network of friends who we can go to or we have a network of family who we can go to or we have savings. All these protect you from actually ending up there. As a society, we owe it to each other to provide a safety net for those positions. Anybody who finds themselves, moving around, whether it’s from, foster care or domestic violence or homelessness, they find themselves without a social safety net in place. So what we try and do is put a safety net in place by allowing people to be recognised by the system and still get access to the services and support that is needed.”

One of the drivers for ProxyAddress was trying to make sure that everybody was better for it. In doing so, it's a service that's free to the end user. It can also help save local authorities and central government money through the cost-saving from incredibly expensive treatment for people when they are a few years down the line into a compounding downwards spiral.

“Ultimately, it seems to me like a no brainer that if we have situations where people are in serious need. We shouldn’t leave them to get worse and worse and worse and then demonise them for being in that position and then refuse to help them.”

ProxyAddress demonstrates the potential for architects to use their skills in innovative ways that go beyond the traditional scope of the field. By examining the systems that underpin cities and intervening in ways that benefit the most vulnerable members of society, interventions such as ProxyAddress are making the city more inclusive and accessible.