Community and Privacy in a Hyper-Connected World

Abstract

Christopher Alexander and Serge Chermayeff co-authored Community and Privacy: Toward a New Architecture of Humanism in 1963. This seminal contribution has largely been forgotten. Today, a human-centred framework is rarely discussed by researchers and practitioners, neither from a theoretical nor a pragmatic perspective. Nonetheless, some fundamental principles defined in that book 60 years ago are pertinent today in our hyper-connected world, and they have been illustrated by the need for human-centred housing during the recent Covid-19 pandemic. This commentary explains the spatial organization of domestic architecture that can support and sustain choices about private and public life in world of global networks, intrusions of social media, and increasing video surveillance that challenge our autonomy and privacy.