Pe'agida

Pe'agida is the Rezese word for housing units which are built with the intention of being freely or cheaply available to the general public, notably the poor. Traditionally, pe'agida were built by Rezese nobility as small cottages clustered around a common clearing with a shared water supply, and surrounded by crops for the impoverished to raise and maintain. Throughout the centuries, the form which the pe'agida have taken has changed in line with the economic and social realities of the era in which the pe'agida was constructed.

Most commonly, pe'agida are single-room units, whether stand-alone, attached, or apartment, and are thought of as emergency housing for those who would otherwise be homeless; many come with work requirements of some kind, typically involving the maintenance of the pe'agida building or community, though some come with no contract at all and are simply places of last resort. In the cases of pea'gida which might have a rental cost, these payments are cheaper than the local median rent and typically come without work stipulations.

History

Pe'agida have existed in Oxidentale in some fashion for as long as written records have. Preserved wax tablets from the 13th-century BCE have noted the construction and maintenance of such communities to house the old and otherwise too infirm to work or adequately support themselves, and whom lacked families which could fulfill the role for them. In one such tablet found in northwestern Sante Reze near the border with Orun Redisus, the writer explains that a freed slave given no remuneration from their former master upon release was best served by either returning to their family or if that was impossible then by finding such a community to ease the transition from enslaved life to that of a common laborer as it was a sort of middle ground between bondage and freedom, where the newly freed received the housing of a slave while having to learn to feed and clothe themselves.

Design

Modern pe'agida since the 1960s have been built as utilitarian apartment buildings, often constructed to addtionally support city infrastructure: many of them have skyways connecting to other buildings, including skyways that don't have access from the pe'agida building itself, are built to support large quantities of solar panels and/or to be capped with wind turbines, or to support on some of their roofs the raised rail lines that cross most Rezese cities.

The units themselves may vary from project to project, but the most common template for a pe'agida apartment unit is a single all-purpose room between 20 and 30 square meters in area. These typically have a small cubicle that functions as both a shower and toilet built as part of a closet area near either the front or the back of the unit depending on where that unit's window is located. Each unit is legally mandated to have a window to the outside, though this is often accomplished by buildings having narrow interior courtyards where windows from the apartments on the other side may be a meter or less away.