VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

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Off-grid housing is advancing rapidly as a technical field, yet its architectural and social dimensions remain significantly underdeveloped. Current research overwhelmingly prioritises energy optimisation and autonomous systems, leaving fundamental questions about how people inhabit, adapt to, and co-produce autonomous living environments largely unexplored. This gap has led to dwellings that achieve technical self-sufficiency but not necessarily spatial quality, cultural fit, or long-term liveability. This paper proposes co-design as a transformative, but currently overlooked, architectural approach for shaping more liveable off-grid futures. While co-design is well established in urban planning and community architecture, it has rarely been mobilised to mediate the complex interactions between spatial form, everyday practices, and technical systems in autonomous housing. The research develops a design-led, multi-actor co-design methodology incorporating spatial prototyping, scenario-based exploration, and iterative workshop cycles with prospective occupants, architects, builders, and technical specialists. The aim is to surface local knowledge, everyday comfort practices, and behavioural insights that are typically absent from off-grid design processes, and to integrate these with architectural decision-making across early concept stages. The paper argues that embedding co-design into off-grid housing offers substantial architectural and societal benefits: improving design–system alignment, reducing performance gaps, strengthening resident autonomy and resilience, and generating context-specific solutions that better support liveable autonomous lifestyles. By reframing autonomy as a socio-spatial rather than purely technical condition, the work positions architecture as a critical agent in shaping equitable, adaptive, and future-ready off-grid housing.