Architect Asif Khan On Wellness, Inner City Sanctuaries And The Future Of Our Cities

Image via Asif Khan

That isn’t just a problem around Old Street, though. On our way to the shop, or on our way home from work, we are surrounded by people. We don’t talk to each other though; we just keep walking, head down and headphones in. “I don’t know how many million people travel on the tube every day in London. We are all sharing the same space, but those spaces don’t induce conversation at all. They actually do the opposite.” The MINI LIVING forests installation is Asif’s way of trying to fix this, and creating “environments where people very naturally feel disarmed.”

The idea of building a link between people was at the core of what Asif was trying to do with the spaces. “I thought of these places as like libraries, where in libraries, you might bring a book and the next week the book might be mine and I take it home, it’s a common item that’s shared between us, a connection between us as people in the city. Here we’ve used the plants, people can bring plants to the space, they can exchange them, and they can take away a plant from the space. Plants are used as not just a bridge between public space and private space but the bridge between individuals.”

That message is key for Oke Hauser, the head architect of the MINI LIVING project. For him, these spaces are important because we can’t afford to have them in our house, “they become so much more valuable if people can share the space on a temporary basis, as possible extensions of their private space.” That’ll ring true for anyone facing London’s crazy rents, where the thought of a living room is a myth, never mind a relaxing room full of plants. 

With rents rising to dizzy new heights all the time, and a city that sucks all our energy, the idea of a sanctuary is becoming more and more important. It’s behind the rise of ‘wellness’ and it’s successor, the unpronounceable Scandinavian concept of ‘hygge’. For Khan, the plant and light filled installations are his attempt at building a sanctuary, “I think sanctuary is actually a mental state, as much as it’s a place. But we don’t have time in our lifestyles at the moment. In the last, say, ten years, it’s got to a breaking point where we feel so encumbered by the responsibility to communicate with other people.” The idea, then, is to take these communications away from iPhones and, as Hauser says, create a “different place to connect instead of smartphones or the 2D surfaces of the screen.”

It's easy to think of parks and public spaces as the places for this escape. In front of our eyes, though, these spaces are being taken away, in what Khan calls the "acceptance of the privitasation of public spaces, also there's a kind of erosion of what we own, or what we feel we own. It's eroded for us, it's eroded for the future of this city." The few parks that we're left with are hopelessly outdated, built a century ago and out of touch with the lives we now lead. For Asif, it is important that we push back and stake a claim for our public spaces: "I think there's a feeling of frustration and disappointment in the world that's being created around us by powers that we are not in control of. It's important that we push at that boundary and we use these projects to suggest alternatives. It's almost an empowerment of ourselves as citizens, to take public space into our own hands and mark out a little bit of territory."