What if heat was a common right? This project engages with the current pressing topics of fuel poverty, affordable housing shortage and social inequality in the urban realm. Situating itself between the UK’s ambition to build 1.5 million new homes by 2030, the climate emergency, land ownership and the Victorian terraced house typology, the project offers a reframing of how we might live with heat and extend and improve our housing stock through retrofit.

By altering the material and spatial reality of the common terraced home, paradigms of ownership, occupation, temporality, and social dynamics are called into question. Learning from Keller Easterling’s concept of active forms, which understands the power of infrastructure to enact change through its propensities and dispositions, the scheme seeks to incrementally alter the existing terraced housing stock towards a more open and collective way of living with heat and each other.