The project proposes a rethinking of what it means to live in a high-density housing estate, wanting to establish how Functionalist Residential Architecture can make its residents feel "At Home". To this end, I propose understanding the differentiation between the concepts of "House" and "Home". Reflecting on the writings of Heidegger, Merleau Ponty and Gaston Bachelard, a house is a functional object, while the home becomes a narrative of living not confined to the extent of the physical dwelling. Depopulation comes at a high cost. Depopulation essentially entails the dissolution of existing social bonds, and ultimately, depopulation gives way to separation. Depopulation and its by-products, further enhanced by the existing architectures of New Belgrade, essentially give way to what Rod Serling labels "the barrier of loneliness". Given demographic projections, depopulation will become pervasive in all Serbian environments. However, I would argue that given the extent of the titanic functionalist housing blocks in New Belgrade, depopulation will be felt particularly harshly in the capital. This phenomenon allows us to pose a different question to the ones pressing during the Yugoslav housing construction periods: is a functional dwelling enough? In analysing and responding to this demographic situation in Serbia, the project was restricted to Block 23 and the Northern Slab Type Housing Building on site. Through the site's sheer size and status as a canonical example of socialist architecture in New Belgrade, Block 23, therefore, becomes the means to respond situationally to a broader societal issue.

The research proposes a dialectical re-reading of the Romanian Communist housing as a gendered control mechanism. Therefore, the thesis concentrates on Berceni neighbourhood between 1977 and 1989 as a case study for a larger urban phenomenon under the late Romanian Communist Regime (1965-1989). In this context, the research juxtaposes the Marxist ideologies on women's emancipation (proliferated throughout the Eastern Block) with the experiences of female inhabitants in Berceni. This contextualisation is crucial, given that response to women's issues was state-enforced and disseminated top-down. In aiding with a broader political and economic agenda, state policy dictated that women should be liberated from home duties (the private sphere) and be transposed into productive members of the society (the public sphere). Given that decision making was assigned to a predominantly male political elite, the state disregarded the family resources necessary to fulfil tasks historically associated with womanhood. Therefore, Socialist Women became just as tied to domesticity as their predecessors. What changed was that they were now forcefully assigned a dual character: an aseptic asexual public persona of state worker along the already existing sexualised domestic one. In understanding the link between women and domesticity, the research confronts the implications of state propaganda on the Lived Experience identified in the stories of some of the women inhabitants of 1977-89 Berceni. Among other points, the paper highlights women's isolation, over-working and distrust as some of the aftermaths of this clash between ideology and context.