The 7th Generation: cooperative housing to facilitate domestic support

Abstract

Historically family typologies in New Zealand consisted of men dominantly maintaining the financial responsibilities and women maintaining the domestic responsibilities. As society developed and underwent modernisation, traditional gender roles transformed accordingly. In contemporary New Zealand, a full time domestic occupant in the majority of households is no longer a reality.

This research project ‘The 7th Generation’ addresses New Zealand’s current housing market and the relationship it has to contemporary family typologies.Cooperative housing typologies have been researched as a mechanism to provide domestic support in homes without full-time domestic occupants, for the next generation of New Zealanders.

“What has the deepest and most permanent effect upon oneself and one’s way of living is the house in which one lives. The house determines the day-to-day, minute to minute quality, colour, atmosphere, pace of one’s life; it is the framework of what one does, of what one can do, of one’s relations with people.” 1

1 Margaret Forster, My life in houses (London: Vintage Books, 2016), V.

Site: Near corner of Balmoral Road and Dominion Roads, Mount Eden, Auckland, New Zealand.