What if housing is seen as an extension of our shared infrastructure rather than a commodity? And what if this is not just a utopian dream, but an ecological and social necessity?

Infrastructure is an engine of public value, which also benefits the private. Housing is almost never viable without access to energy, water, waste, education, healthcare, community, greenery, culture and good governance. This year, we explore two critical shifts. Instead of depending on these infrastructural networks, can housing become their integral part? And instead of state-directed welfare, could this infrastructur-ing be a duty for the public at large – to imagine, to create and to care for? We ask what implications this will have for urbanism: can it continue to amplify the network effect and desirability of cities, while overcoming our crisis of affordability? 

Over the decades, governments have contrived an ever-growing mass of frameworks, guidance and strategies to appraise the value of infrastructure. Yet these understandings of ‘value for money’ inevitably create metrics which distort and misdirect investment with systemic consequences, and are increasingly contested by those with experiences which fall outside the gaze of the bureaucrat. By investigating para-sites, we look for opportunities beside and alongside the site, where the value created by existing infrastructure – whether physical, social or ecological – is being underused or misdefined, and can be rewired. Drawing on economic concepts of non-rivalry and non-excludability, we will design physical structures integrated with strategies that act as value capture devices.

Diploma 9 is not a bubble for academic speculation, but a platform to incubate live projects. We are looking for members who truly believe in architecture. Individuals who, in the face of contradictory forces, have the courage to propose radical solutions at scales that would rebalance our relationships with property, land and resources. Individuals who believe that by reshaping our built environment and the systems around it, we can also shape our political imagination of the possible.