Funding Strategy Concentrates on the Small Scale
Social housing construction cannot be financed entirely by the residents, thus a government or non-governmental entity has to step in and shoulder the costs. In itself, this simple dependence raises issues that affect the shape of the construction. Involving future residents in building their own houses will reduce the initial monetary outlay. The more money invested by an external agency in social housing, however, the more control it will wish to exert over the final product. This natural consequence inevitably leads to the subconscious adoption of a geometry of control, as was outlined in a previous section.
We can offer a few alternatives:
- Funding sources now determine social housing morphology. Central government, wanting to build in the most efficient manner, reverts to a highly prescriptive approach, and is willing to sacrifice complexity of form. That attitude cannot generate an urban quarter. We need to develop a flexible, performance-based standard for morphology. We also need to identify alternative sources of funding to break the prescriptive monopoly, and thereby to break out of this antipattern (i.e., a wrong practice that has been adopted and is repeated uncritically through inertia).
- Raise funds from various sources in order to ensure that homes are affordable to neighborhood residents. A private-public partnership is the most effective way of using the market economy to generate an urban quarter, instead of a monolithic monster favored by government bureaucracy.
- Involvement with non-governmental organizations will keep a suspicious central government from sabotaging the use of pattern languages in building an urban quarter, or in converting an existing dysfunctional project into an urban quarter. (For pattern languages, see Alexander’s book (Alexander et al., 1977), Salingaros (2005; 2017), and earlier essays in this series).
We are sadly aware of numerous projects of social housing that do not serve the poor, but are simply investment opportunities for the builder or landowner to siphon money from the government. If the government subsidizes rents, then the opportunity does exist for speculative building that will recover initial construction investments (with interest) from rents alone. In such cases, the physical condition of the residents is of little importance. Moreover, the maintenance and future condition of the built fabric is not a part of the profit equation, since there is no expectation of recovering investment from the building structures themselves. It is usually expected that the buildings will decay, thus encouraging non-permanent construction from the very beginning. Clearly, subsidized rents can work against humane social housing, contradicting the intention of the original legislation.
Often, feasible, sustainable, and affordable solutions are rejected for reasons of excessive greed. Good affordable housing has the disadvantage that profit margins are always low (unless the market is manipulated to create an artificial scarcity). If the government or the developers fail to see opportunities to get rich in the process, they may decide to withdraw support from a project, even if they have pledged their support initially. You need a profit to encourage participation, but that has to be balanced with the payback from solving a serious societal problem.
Involvement with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) requires that housing authorities build not only public-private partnerships for redevelopment, but also elaborate networks of local partners. All of these benefit from the allocated money. However, one of the weaknesses here is that, while agencies have been good at getting the local social service providers and city agencies to cooperate, they have not been so good at engaging the support of the tenants.
Most social service providers are still operating according to the old model of service provision, rather than the newer emerging models of “community based” solutions to a wide variety of problems. The old social service model engages people in networks based on their particular pathologies (and there is a whole service industry that depends on what people lack). The new model engages people based on their gifts and what they bring to the network (and not what they “need”). This new model, based on the idea of asset-based community development, has had wide application in public health, and more generally in community organizing.
Larger is not better
We also face a problem with funding sources that wish to minimize the administrative burden by concentrating on the large scale. It is far easier to give out money in one large sum than to track the same amount divided and distributed out to many different borrowers. Reducing the number of transactions takes precedence over other systems based upon supply and demand. Nevertheless, it is crucial to have exactly this micro-funding flexibility for the people to be able to build their own houses. Repair of an existing neighborhood requires a vast number of small interventions. Promising work has been done in developing effective management systems to permit such micro-loans (e.g. the Grameen Bank). Again, this is actually a more sophisticated and more advanced financial model, as it is more highly differentiated.
In the first papers of this series, we mentioned the obstacle posed by ingrained geometrical images of control. Those images, widely propagated through the global media and educational institutions, are also tied to a deep prejudice against the small scale. Visual conditioning that identifies “larger is better” influences our way of thinking, and privileges an industrial but flawed approach which then applies to conceptualizing projects in general.
A government project takes a certain overhead to administer, which is independent of the size of the project. Naturally, bureaucrats wish to minimize the total number of projects, which leads them to approve a few very large projects. For example, faced with building a new urban quarter, they wish to build it as large as possible, and all at the same time, so as to economize on the bureaucratic overhead. That approach contradicts our suggestions of building an urban quarter one small piece at a time, and iterating back and forth between the design steps.
Contemporary society finds itself in a paradoxical situation. Faced with disaster on many related fronts: fossil energy exhaustion; encroachment and depletion of the agricultural terrain; cities growing out of control and becoming increasingly dysfunctional, society continues to implement urban practices that have led to these problems. Citizens of weak governments take urbanization into their own hands, with results such as owner-built settlements that range from acceptable to disastrous. Since they are all extra-governmental, the government does not help to ameliorate these efforts in any way but tries only to suppress them whenever it can.
In countries or within specific regions with stronger central control, however, political power works in concert with money interests to impose unsustainable built fabric. Adding to and aggravating this unhealthy state of events, the global media continue to promote cult images of a sterile industrial “modernity” along with its false prophets selling extremely expensive and energivorous high-tech buildings.
Among the many fundamental misunderstandings that drive poleoctonic (city-destroying) urban practices today, one finds the utopian image of “the shiny new building that takes care of itself”. A star architect is paid an exorbitant fee to design a non-adaptive building, which is then built as a symbol of a country or city’s “modernity”. Whether this is a tower of luxurious apartments, offices for a powerful firm or government institution, or a museum of contemporary art, the project is sold to the public as an image that is never supposed to tarnish. Maintenance costs are never even discussed, nor is the crucial question of who is going to want to maintain a building that is strange and unloved.
The crucial issue for maintaining the urban fabric lies here: if something is loved by its inhabitants they will invest the energy to maintain it; otherwise they will let it decay or actively contribute to its physical degradation. Our approach to building social housing hinges upon this understanding, and our proposals try to generate urban fabric that is “owned” by its users psychologically.