Radical density and flexibility in post-domestic housing: a prospective from the earliest ‘urban’ settlements Kevin Kay Dept. of Archaeology, University of Cambridge 21st century housing challenges: do more with less space. E-commerce and working-from-home Changing and more diverse households Need for efficient construction and use of space How can radically different urban traditions inform housing design that is flexible, multi-functional, and space-efficient? Alternative Cities: Insights into Dense, Flexible Design? Informal Cities Postcolonial Transformations Ancient Cities Çatalhöyük Can Hasan Aşıklı Höyük Clustered neighbourhood settlements in Turkey, ca. 8200 – 6200 BCE Soft and Hard Flexibility Tatjana Schneider& Jeremy Till (Flexible Housing. London: Routledge. 2005.) identify two strategies that contemporary architects use to achieve durable, multi-functional housing: Hard Flexibility Soft Flexibility Many functions are designed into a small space by an architect Centralized design Only foreseen transformations afforded Potentially highly space-efficient Architect designs a space with as little constraint on organization/use as possible; users adapt ‘frame’ to use. Distributed design Open-ended customization Often includes spatial redundancies/inefficiency Assessing Design in Çatalhöyük Houses The development over time of six broadly contemporary houses in the northern part of the ancient city were analysed using stratigraphic contemporaneity analysis. Furnishings’ addition to, or removal from, the house were traced onto a timeline of the best possible resolution, and assessed on two components: Reconstruction by J.G. Swogger; Plan & photo courtesy Çatalhöyük Research Project Tempo The overall rate of transformation in each house’s interior furnishing and organisation. Temporality The timing and duration of furnishings’ addition and use, relative to one another (as well as the addition of burials and depositions of exotic material below floors). Radical Density and Flexibility at Çatalhöyük Houses at Çatalhöyük were pre-domestic, serving a wide variety of public and private uses. Although all houses served these purposes, the exact mix of activities in a given house changed over time – sometimes dramatically. Results: Flexible Housing, Then & Now Thoroughfare People moved around the town across the rooftops of houses. Living Houses contained space and furnishings for cooking, storage, and sleeping Working Houses were sites for agricultural processing, craft production, as well as continual maintenance work Gathering Houses served as cemeteries, feasting venues, locations for artistic display and performance, and were the only ‘civic’ spaces available at Çatalhöyük. By interrogating the history of changes in houses’ interiors at Çatalhöyük’s densest period, several design strategies became apparent: Open-plan design for maximum flexibility ‘Harder’ flexible elements with highest number of stakeholders Topology & friction: the work of non-barrier boundaries Reconstruction by K. Killackey. (Below) Photo courtesy Çatalhöyük Research Project