Reimagining Asylum Accommodation Towards an Infrastructure of Care

Part 2 Dissertation 2026
Lauren Goodchild
 University of Brighton | UK
This dissertation repositions asylum accommodation as a spatial and typological question, rather than solely a policy or welfare issue. While the psychological and social impacts of temporary housing are well documented, the architectural conditions producing these experiences have received little plan-based or design-led scrutiny. This research addresses that gap.

Using The Bell Hotel in Epping Forest as a case study, the research piece examines hotel-based contingency accommodation across three interconnected scales: the individual room, the building's internal organisation, and its urban context. Spatial analysis reveals that hotel layouts designed for short-term hospitality - undifferentiated rooms lacking cooking facilities, corridor-dominated circulation with no communal space, and peripheral urban siting -actively reproduce the precarity these systems are meant to alleviate, undermining the individuals forced to reside there’s autonomy, privacy, and access to civic life.

By combining literature review, contextual mapping, and detailed spatial analysis with reference to national space standards, the research demonstrates that architectural configuration is not a neutral backdrop but an active mechanism shaping lived experience. This reframes asylum accommodation as an architectural responsibility, not just an administrative one.

These findings were tested through the design of a pilot project, Common Grounds, which translates the research into concrete design principles: differentiated domestic space, distributed communal areas, and urban integration rather than isolation.

The research offers a design-led contribution to a field dominated by policy critique, proposing that architecture itself can be reconfigured as an infrastructure of care.

Tutor(s)
Dana Hamdan
2026
A ‘typical double’ hotel room (GIA approximately 15.4m2, bedroom 10.7m2, WC 2.7m2) extracted from the wider first-floor plan. The unit is single-aspect, accessed directly from a single-loaded corridor overlooking the car park, and accommodates sleeping, w
A ‘typical double’ hotel room at The Bell Hotel (approximately 15.4m2) shown alongside a 1B2P (one-bedroom, one-person) residential unit taken from my final design project (approximately 50m2). The comparison reveals that the hotel room provides approxima
The hotel sits on the High Road at Bell Common, on the western edge of Epping, bordered by the M25 to the south and the protected landscape of Epping forest to the west. The building is positioned approximately 800 meters from the nearest residential clus
The drawing deconstructs the first-floor plan into four layers; (1) circulation corridors, (2) typical movement patterns, (3) incidental encounters generated by these movements, and (4) moments of avoidance produced by narrow circulation spaces. The corri
Five residential units developed in response to the spatial deficits identified through analysing The Bell Hotel (Figure 4.5).The five units range from 1B1P at 45m2 to 3B4P at 91m2. Each unit provides differentiated zones for cooking, eating, hosting, liv
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