A Co - Living Model : For the Millennials of India, Gurugram

Abstract

With the ever-increasing costs of apartments and the lack of suitable rental options in the metropolitan cities, there is a growing gap between the housing supply and demand for the young working force of the country. They are the fresh graduates, bachelors, young couples and even students belonging to the age group of 18 to 35 years of age, known as the Gen Y or the ‘Millennials’. A generation which is constantly on a move, hopping from one city to another in search of a better job and higher education opportunities. On the other hand, the unorganized nature of the rental sector with poorly maintained accommodations and limited facilities in the cities has led to a commotion and has offered great scope for affordable community living in the form of Co-living. It is the modern conceptualizing of the old neighbourhood living, and has emerged from the need and desire to live affordably but also to share and interact with other fellow beings at the same time. The co-living complexes emerged in India in the year 2015 and have been growing ever since. However, the concept is relatively new to the builders, trying to foster the idea of iconic large-scale projects situated in countries abroad. Typically the co-living complexes in India are small scale adaptive-reuse projects, re-worked on leased buildings not meant for the purpose consequently degrading the quality and defeating the motive of the establishment. Hence, the thesis project aims at bridging the design gap by understanding the limitations in the Indian co-living model and at the same time understanding the needs and demands of the users in the Indian context. Further, a list of design parameters were drawn through a user survey, in terms of their preferred size and type of the community, sharing preferences, space utilization, provision of amenities, combination of co-working spaces and community organisation to provide a proper build-to-suit model for the Indian millennials. The scope of the project ranges from a residential to a commercial zone stacked vertically in a high-rise building constituting the whole co-living complex. The residential zone consists of various types of units along with their shared communal spaces, for example, laundry, common kitchens, guest rooms, game rooms etc. While the commercial zone consists of public facilities such as a supermarket, a library, a restaurant and café, semi-public facilities like a clubhouse consisting of swimming pool, gym, restaurant bar, daycare etc., along with the office floors comprising of the co-working and exhibition/gallery spaces.