During the pandemic, I focused on researching solutions to the housing crisis. I became particularly interested in Open Systems Lab’s work on Fairhold — a model of home ownership that can be implemented without political gatekeeping — and began exploring how it could inform a new vision for land and community development in Ireland.

With support from a €3,000 Professional Development Award from the Irish Arts Council, I undertook a three-month part-time collaborative research residency with Open Systems Lab. Our work centred on Fairhold: a form of ownership that allows people to own a home as a place to live rather than a financial asset.

From this collaboration, the Atlas of Ownership emerged as a project in its own right. We defined a broad research scope, gathering case studies from across history and around the world, including a deep dive into Ireland’s pre-colonial legal system, Brehon Law. The Atlas became a digital, open library of land-ownership models, unbundled and classified to reveal patterns across societies, eras, and legal traditions. Its aim is to surface universal principles of how humans relate to land — grounded in social wellbeing, ecological balance, and economic fairness - and to communicate them in plain english, so that you don’t need to hire a consultant to understand laws relating to the land. It is currently used as a research tool in MArch Diploma Unit 9 at the Architectural Association in London, which focuses on the possibility of universal free housing.

While collaborating with Alastair Parvin and the Open Systems Lab team (based in the west of Ireland, London, and LA), we uncovered recurring universal concepts of home. Our research showed how modern private property systems — often upheld through the threat of eviction — remain extractive, exploitative, and tied to colonial legacies still embedded in nation-state governance.

I presented the Atlas of Ownership at an academic event at the department of Architecture in Cambridge University amongst other leading academics and practitioners in the field in February 2023. https://atlasofownership.org/