Susie Cox
Explore Lab
Meshworks of care: counteracting neglect through webs, knots and entanglement
Austerity and high land values have seen space available to care institutions minimised, privatised and restricted in the name of efficiency and maximum profit. This project argues that care within architecture needs to be reclaimed from the closed practices that are framing it and inhabited in its multiplicity. This work is situated in Wood Green, North London, where existing care institutions have struggled to survive public funding cuts. Rather than supporting existing infrastructure, the local authority has attempted to solve deprivation with expensive, new blocks and buildings.
This project considers how existing networks of support can be sustained and cultivated instead. This is imagined as a new common framework, a new form of governance and inhabitation, which I describe as a ‘meshwork of care’. The framework extrudes from either new or existing resources to connect separate groups, reconfiguring the known social structures of those who care, those who are deprived and the spaces they occupy.