Kaczmarczyk, Magdalena2024-12-112024-12-112024-12-112024-11-26https://hdl.handle.net/10012/21224Humanity and architecture have been in a long dialogue with Utopia. Since Thomas More’s publication in the 1500s, the term of “Utopia” has been adopted by architects, artists, and intellectuals alike, using it as either a point of contentious discussion, or as something to strive for. Within architecture, the application of utopia has been vast, from Boullée and Ledoux to the speculative architectures of Cedric Price and Superstudio in the 60s–70s. These utopias, despite the variances of design outcomes, all share a common denominator: the intent to design the ideal. Using the architectural utopia as a framework, It’s Not a Room, It’s The Home I’ll Never Have is a theoretical research and speculative design thesis that investigates the condition of Canada’s housing crisis, entitled The City of Rooms. In the thesis, the role of critical utopias within architecture is explored through generative artificial intelligence (genAI) as a proxy for neoliberalist design and decision making. The work questions the self-iterative neoliberal trends, and envisions an optimizational utopia in which minimum dwelling units are the ideal response to the question of the housing crisis through a set of speculative images located in Toronto. If the goal of the critical utopia is to examine how we live, then the current housing crisis that many major Canadian cities are facing can serve as an urgent case for such analysis; the alienating real-estate development, privatization, and profit optimization has continuously resulted in smaller and smaller living space and exacerbates the existing housing crisis. This problem stems from a set of neoliberalist policy changes in the 80s, where the Canadian government loosened tenancy protections, eliminated funding for affordable housing, and deregulated the financial sector. Lacking specific regulation to prevent this, the problem has evolved into a self-iterative system that propagates to this day. Ultimately, the key impact of this research is to reveal and critically analyze the neoliberal techniques employed in the housing market in Toronto, while showcasing the beneficial use-case of speculative design when bringing the ideology to its logical, utopian conclusion.enUtopiaCritical UtopiaNeoliberalismArtificial IntelligenceGenerative Artificial IntelligenceSpeculative DesignMinimum DwellingArchitectureIt's Not a Room, It's The Home I'll Never HaveMaster Thesis