Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic One summer afternoon, Shawn Adams and Larry Botchway, two young architects from London, stand outside the Stratford Centre in the east of the capital, and cast their eyes over the dreary-looking building. Opened in 1974, the shopping mall distinctly lacks presence. It slouches on the pavement and stares mournfully up at Westfield Stratford City, a newer shopping centre dropped in front of it in 2011. While Westfield is a trophy of gleaming glass and steel, a wonderland of branded delights, the Stratford Centre seems to function primarily as a convenient pedestrian corridor that takes you from one side of the town centre to, well, Westfield.That the Stratford Centre wasn’t condemned completely when the new shopping centre was built was a surprise to many, including Adams and Botchway. But since then, they’ve observed the building burst into life (and not because of the shiny “shoal” of metal canopies erected in front of it as part of a London Olympics facelift).Sure, it lacks natural light and a Sephora, but it’s a 24-hour sheltered throughway with an annual footfall of well over 20 million. The inner hallway has a thriving market where fruit and veg are sold alongside rugs and Arabian oud; the rooftop car park hosts a summer cinema and events; and at night, when the shops are shuttered, skateboarders congregate to skid and snap on the hard, smooth floor alongside breakdancers and roller skaters. While it “wasn’t designed for people to interact with”, Botchway believes, the building has been “readopted and reactivated” to the benefit of the community. “It’s a good bad building,” says Botchway, beaming up at it. “There are lessons we can learn from it, ideas we can extract.”For these two, the Stratford Centre shows that, rather than being knocked down, buildings can be repurposed and retrofitted in a way that is responsive to local needs. In particular, when a space is open and unconstrained by conventions (“why shouldn’t you be able to buy fruit and veg in a shopping mall?”), it can begin to represent those who use it.Adams and Botchway, both 30, both from Mitcham, and, today at least, both wearing impeccably crisp white T-shirts, are co-founders of POoR Collective, short for Power Out of Restriction. The group of four young architects and an accountant, founded in 2019, believes that the built environment is best when co-designed with the communities that live there.It aims to instil a sense of ownership in local spaces for those usually excluded from the decision-making process. In Barnet, for example, it worked with local youth to reimagine a rundown sports pavilion, giving it a colourful makeover that brings a sense of festivity to the playing field. After winning last year’s Emerging Design Medal at London Design Festival, it has run workshops with young residents of Wandsworth to produce a public art piece, prompted by the question “What does Battersea mean to you?” Due to be unveiled at Battersea Power Station during the festival, the project has invited the local community into the heart of one of London’s grandest developments.Along with Matt Harvey, 30, Ben Spry, 31, and Akmaral Khassen, 28, of POoR Collective, Adams and Botchway are part of a growing movement that seeks to challenge the industry to consider how its orthodoxies can create design blind spots that would be obvious to others, if only they were asked. The pair agreed to take me on a tour of some of the sites in London that inspire them: places that illustrate the often intangible interplay between architecture and community, and the surprising things it can teach us. Sometimes that simply means doing a closer reading of a space that may seem outdated. The Stratford Centre is a shining example. “The high street is dying but this is alive,” says Adams. “It’s buzzing.” Acknowledging this liveliness, the queues for oud, the buskers, the families hopping from the Halifax to KFC, is important, particularly when such spaces often get written off and demolished, or redeveloped to cater to the tastes of a gentrifying class.Take Brixton Market, or the Latin Village in Tottenham, both vibrant local ecosystems that have spent recent years battling the wrecking ball. “You may look and think ‘this doesn’t work’, but for the people who use it, it does,” says Botchway. He dives into Sainsbury’s to grab a snack, Adams steps in gum and we exit the shopping centre, chomping and grumbling, for Stratford station. We’re heading up to Wood Green, north London. While Adams uses a POoR Collective business card to pick at the sole of his shoe, Botchway tells me what drew him to a profession in which less than half of practice founders went to state school (compared to roughly 90 per cent of the UK population), and only 1 per cent are Black (compared to 4 per cent of the UK population).Botchway grew up on a council estate, and his experience of architecture had always been top-down; the council informing residents that everyone’s kitchens were to be redesigned or the parking area reorganised. “I grew accustomed to not being part of the decision-making process,” he says. He decided to study architecture at Portsmouth on a whim, where, to his surprise, he met Adams, who also grew up in a working-class household just a street away from him. (Adams, conversely, had always wanted to become an architect.) They found themselves researching ideas around community inclusion: “Who’s getting platformed? What voices are being included?”Botchway is nostalgic about his estate, but there are many examples, particularly in social housing, where one can see a detachment between visionary architects, often from middle-class backgrounds, and the needs of those who actually live in their buildings. As we travel up the escalator at Turnpike Lane station, he mentions Robin Hood Gardens in Poplar, a postwar Brutalist block that was knocked down in 2017 and 2022, despite earlier opposition from some of architecture’s leading lights, such as Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers.There is sometimes a detachment between architects and the needs of those who live in their buildingsRobin Hood Gardens was a striking experiment of the “streets in the sky” concept, an ambitious, utopian vision for working-class life that reimagined terraced streets at height. “Architects loved it,” says Botchway. “But if you asked the residents what they’d prioritise, they might say something different.” Walls and moats designed to shield residents from the encircling traffic generated an isolated feel, and some blamed the design for crime and antisocial behaviour.Even when Robin Hood Gardens was pegged for demolition, the debate over saving it centred on its merits as a piece of architectural heritage rather than the experiences and needs of those within it. While some residents were comfortable with it being redeveloped, others simply wanted their homes to be properly maintained. Neglect was as much to blame as design in the building’s failure; neglecting to listen to those living there too.From Turnpike Lane we walk up to Wood Green to visit a project that embodies the radical approach that POoR Collective champions; one in which the users of a space were involved in its design from conception. Rising Green Youth Hub, which opened in 2022, was designed by JA Projects, founded by architect Jayden Ali, and Freehaus on behalf of Haringey Council.But really, you could say it was designed by the young people who use it, who were invited to take part in a three-month consultation process that culminated in an opportunity for them to “broadcast” directly to key stakeholders in the council and regeneration team. It is, as Adams puts it, “a dream project”.The space is an innocuous retrofitted retail unit, tucked in a side street off the High Road, hidden behind a pile of wooden pallets. We buzz the door, and a man in a plastic apron darts over from a table where a group of youngsters are painting to welcome us in. Adams and Botchway explain the nature of our visit, and he nods: “Ah, Jayden!” It’s another subtle indicator of how the co-design process functions as a leveller that here, the youth workers are on first-name terms with the architects. For Adams and Botchway, Rising Green illustrates what a space looks like when the end user comes first. Built on a budget, it prioritises function over form: the ceilings and walls are fairly raw, stripped back to the brickwork, but by saving on decor it could invest in the things that matter, such as a training kitchen and music studios.Usually, a community space would be designed with a free-flowing entrance that opens up or spills into the street (here you need to be buzzed in), or perhaps it would boast an eye-catching façade. For some young Londoners, that sort of design can actually feel unsafe; to be able to enter a space that is discreet and protected from the outside environment is crucial to them wanting to use it. It’s the sort of input that the architects paid attention to here, says Botchway, even if “some of what they’ve done is actually anti-architecture”, rejecting the idea of rebuilding.For Adams and Botchway, the co-design process requires trust, and an openness to be led to ideas that might contradict even their own architectural learnings. In 2021, POoR Collective worked with teenagers at an alternative provision school in Becontree to design an installation that felt like a safe, meaningful place to hang out. The result was a colourful carousel of canopies around a circular platform. It was partially inspired by the sort of structures found in supermarket car parks, a location, they learnt, where these young people felt relatively autonomous, while also reassured by the peripheral presence of security guards. Adams and Botchway assumed the teenagers would want their installation located locally. They were completely wrong. Instead, the young people imagined it placed in central London, staking a claim to a part of the city they didn’t feel they had access to. “It felt like a restricted area to them,” says Botchway, “somewhere where the Queen lived.” POoR Collective secured a location in Regent’s Park and the project was given its title: Bringing Home to the Unknown.Our final stop is the Brixton Recreation Centre (or Brixton Rec), a dominating red-brick civic building that stands upright like a beating heart amid the roads, alleyways and railways that pulse with activity around it. It feels as though providing people with a sense of ownership over their environment has never been so vitalDesigned in 1970, the building was conjured by the socialist architect George Finch, who, as the son of a milkman, would still buck the trend today among those in the profession. Inside is a huge leisure centre with an epic atrium and swimming pool from which you can watch the trains roll past. Outside, local businesses and cafés burrow into retail spaces around its base, and the smell of chlorine swirls with the warm, smoky scent of jerk chicken. There are stalls selling T-shirts, vans serving Caribbean food, tables and chairs on the street, people hanging out — all part of its galaxy. “For anyone who knows Brixton, it is an iconic space: everyone has a story about it,” says Adams (his own is the time a taxi got jammed between two metal bollards at the top of the street).While POoR Collective primarily works on smaller interventions, Adams looks to Brixton Rec as a statement of what is possible when a community space is substantial. “I think there’s something quite powerful about the way it works,” he says. “But who would pay for something like this now?”Just as the Stratford Centre, with its intangible alchemy, sits opposite a vision of a modern commercial development, Brixton Rec is juxtaposed by Pop Brixton, a shipping-container village with street food and shops; a model that has become a staple in urban placemaking. “I like projects like Pop Brixton, and the moments it creates,” says Adams, “but why do these spaces always need to be shipping containers that have been painted?”In many ways Brixton Rec is the polar opposite of the sorts of “meanwhile spaces” that London’s venues, independent businesses and community projects so often have to settle for. As many communities strain to hold themselves together in the face of the financial pressures that uproot them from the areas they grew up in, it feels as though providing people with a sense of ownership over their environment, and a sense of permanency, has never been so vital.These are the sorts of ideas that POoR Collective hopes to instil in future generations. “In our work with communities we’re always saying, ‘Why does it have to be ad hoc? Why does it have to be low quality?’” says Adams. “Why can’t we all have access to good design?” “Together In Battersea” is on display in Turbine Hall A inside Battersea Power Station from September 20 to October 13 as part of London Design FestivalFollow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
