Retrofitting informal housing
If slums disappear only through conflagration (natural or man-made) or by assimilation into the formal city, then we will need to take existing informal housing and gradually formalize it.
Because you are what you live in, urbanization requires formality:
But as cities imply increasing physical density (more cubic space per square foot of land area), we have to go up, and many an informal settlement is constructed of materials too flimsy to support a higher story: we have to make the informal house into an embryo house. This is a challenge in architecture, one taken up by two architects, whose efforts are profiled in an intriguing blog post from De Zeen Design Magazine:
Architects Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson have developed a strategy to develop informal slums into permanent urban districts through a process of gradual improvement to existing dwellings instead of demolition and rebuilding.
Architect’s vision, fusing CAD/CAM with photography
Since cities are messy and people need different configurations at different points in their lives, formalizing the existing requires multiple options.
“Aerial collage: the new archipelago of incremented kaccha houses rising from a sea of well-built permanent homes in a typical slum.”
The architects have developed three house typologies consisting of simple frames that allow for later expansion.
It’s absolutely critical that houses be expandable. As the authors write:
We developed three basic prototypes for the slum dwellers to choose from.
House A is a two story home, structured like a three-story home to ensure safety in future vertical extension.
House A: two stories, maybe plus one?
House B has an incrementable ground floor, which is left open for either parking or for the family to turn that open space into a shop.
House B: ground floor room to expand?
House C has an incrementable middle floor, to hang clothes or to be used like a living room.
House C: ground floor room to expand?
All proposals are for one family and 270 sq foot area (grant regulations).
As Frank Lloyd Wright found when experimenting with his Usonian house, the discipline of keeping to limited materials and low construction cost forces great architectural creativity:
Wright’s Usonian House: motivated by low cost and affordability
It’s a challenge to squeeze all the uses into a tiny space.
Making every square foot count
“After creating works for Rem Koolhaas at OMA/ AMO, Neutelings Riedijk, NL architects, and Thomas Sandell, I found it essential to search for the opposite experience: to work for the ones who cannot pay,” says Balestra.
As a pro-poor consultant myself, I like their thinking; regardless of how much they pay, they are your customers, and you never tell your customer what to want.
The strategy strengthens the informal and aims to accelerate the legalization of the homes of the urban poor.
In September 2008, architects Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson were invited by Sheela Patel and Jockin Arputham (www.sparcindia.org) to come to India to design an Incremental Housing Strategy. The strategy had to be implementable anywhere.
Sheela Patel of SPARC, taken in at SDI’s July, 2008 London meeting
Recently we hosted an AHI Exchange with Sheela and Liverpool’s Andrea Titterington, on the subject of the community’s role in complex urban regeneration.
The communities are asked to engage with the construction process to customize each house, i.e. each family will paint the house the color they want. After all, who knows better than the people themselves how do they want to live?
As Andrea put it at the AHI Exchange, quoting a community group she was working with, “Nothing about us, without us, is for us.”
These architects used active community involvement in designing their modules:
Everybody gets to move the blocks around
Soon after Filipe and Sara arrived to Bombay, a team of international architects, urban planners, landscape architects and graphic designers volunteered to set up the strategy which uses the existing urban formations as starting point for development. Organic patterns that have evolved during time are preserved and existing social networks are respected. Neighbors remain neighbors, local remains local.
Harnessing the wisdom of slum dwellers
When Filipe and Sara started working they did not know the Indian government would initiate a grant of 4500 euro/ family for the incrementation of their homes at a national scale. The grant is now active and it can be given to any family who lives in a kaccha – an old temporary structure, not suitable for living.
‘Not suitable’? The longer I work in this arena internationally, the less willing I am to declare any particular form of housing ‘unacceptable,’ simply because there’s always something worse, and something better, in the same country or a neighboring one.
Life in a kaccha: unsuitable, or better than the alternatives?
The goal is an ever-evolving, ever-improving housing environment, and the only thing varying from place to place is the urgency of making that improvement.
Suitability is in the beholder’s eye and varies from place to place
While keeping the community intact …
It is called City In-Situ Rehabilitation Scheme for Urban Poor Staying in Slums in City of Pune Under BSUP, JNNURM.
Be it ever so humble, it’s all the home some people have
A pilot project will be implemented in Pune, India but the architects believe the strategy could be appropriate in any country with similar urban conditions.
I’m skeptical as to the practical economics and construction logistics – but who cares about my skepticism? This is what pilots are for.
First you have to believe!
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