Practical solutions and implementable alternatives

The vernacular building tradition is again being recognized as providing a much-needed solution to the world’s housing problem. Using traditional typologies and local materials, people can build urban fabric far more cheaply than with the industrial methods we in the developed western nations have come to accept unquestioningly. Looking back at all the well-intentioned solutions to mass housing, many if not most of them have turned out to be failures in the social sense as well as in the tectonic sense. We offer here an alternative approach to housing, working towards long-term sustainability. Most important, we believe the essential point is to help attach residents to their built environment.

An explicit generative sequence for housing on a Greenfield (unbuilt or virgin area) or open Brownfield (previously built region, usually industrial or commercial, that has fallen into disrepair and has been cleared) comes from actual projects designed and built by Christopher Alexander (as detailed in The Nature of Order, 2001-2005). We also make extensive reference to his earlier A Pattern Language (1977). 

Previous essays in this series investigated the multi-faceted problems of accommodating social housing in an innovative manner that helps establish emotional and social ownership for the residents. We offered practical solutions that are at great variance with current urban implementations of both government agencies, and well-meaning Non-Governmental Organizations. We made our objections explicit, and offered what we consider to be implementable alternatives. In this way, we hope to be able to solve the world’s monumental housing problem by utilizing the energies and aspirations of the residents themselves. 

We identify some of the problems that we face because of a set way of doing things in the past several decades. There exist problems of perception and those due to ideology, which mix with and further aggravate genuine problems of innovative implementation. We believe that it is possible to solve all these problems, but not before they are clearly delineated. 

In particular, we are wasting our time proposing practical solutions as long as governments and the construction industry blindly follow architectural dogma and fashions. Since those are deeply ingrained in academia and the intellectual-governing class, and are unthinkingly promoted by the global media, it is going to be a hard struggle to achieve our aims. The majority of architects seem ready to sacrifice adaptive housing for humanity as long as they can uphold their ideology of sterile forms. We hope to reverse all that by returning to a bottom-up method of design. 

This series of essays faces the difficult problem of retrofitting the favela to make it an acceptable part of urban fabric. Sometimes it cannot be done. We discuss a reinforcement strategy for when it is feasible to do so. We will analyze some failures to understand the life of a squatter, such as their economic need for proximity to the city. This makes new social housing built far outside the city unattractive. We also warn against grand schemes that can turn into economic disasters, and blame architects for imposing modernist forms on social housing. That geometry makes them hostile for residents. But we also blame the residents themselves for rejecting adaptive housing and urban typologies, wanting instead the sterile images of modernism. Conditions are different today from the past several decades, and offer optimism for a broad acceptance of adaptive housing.

Maintenance Strategy Concentrates on the User

Unless provisions are made at the beginning for the continued maintenance of the built environment, it will turn dysfunctional. Favelas and social housing projects can have very serious problems, but some are clearly less successful in a social sense than others, and their physical deterioration is seen to increase with time. This idea is in keeping with the organic conception of the urban fabric. All living entities require continual upkeep and repair: it is part of being alive. Here we may distinguish the two main components of life itself as separated into genetic and metabolic mechanisms. Genetic processes build the organism in the first place, whereas metabolic processes keep it running and also repair it continuously.

The same processes, or their close analogues, apply to the urban fabric as an organic entity. Once built, it has to incorporate within itself the mechanisms for its maintenance. Maintenance does not come from a top-down process. We are disappointed at the widespread neglect of the forces responsible for the temporal evolution of urban fabric, and what is required to maintain it in healthy order. Many people somehow have an unrealistic, static conception of urban form. The organic model leads to several recommendations:

1. Encourage and support tenants to maintain their dwellings, by ensuring an emotional connection from the very beginning. The traditional subsidized rental solution has been disastrous. It is unlikely for a tenant to value a faceless material structure owned by someone else. It is possible, however, to establish a sense of collective ownership and responsibility. In a rental situation, it is all the more important to create conditions for effective and meaningful collective control and self-management. Literal ownership isn’t always necessary. A stakeholder, in the usual sense, can also be somebody with a sense of ownership in the process.

2. Make it possible to own an affordable home, even if it is the most primitive type of dwelling. Encourage government financial underwriting, seen as a sound future investment that prevents social housing from being destroyed by its tenants.

3. Establish a strict legislated code of responsibility for the residents. The key to the success of such a code is that the residents must have a sense of ownership of the code. It is crucial that they participate in its formulation, and be part of its enforcement. Owners can be held accountable for maintaining their environment, whereas this is more difficult to achieve with renters. Since supply can never meet demand, owners can be made to care for their dwellings.

4. An observed rule of urbanism is that the level of provided services is proportional to the level of regulations and restrictions. Favelas get no services, and also have no regulations. At the other extreme, high-income gated communities get many services, but are also highly regulated.

The ability of tenants to maintain their dwellings cannot be achieved by requiring them to put in work time organized by a central authority (with the ability to evict them for noncompliance). “Maintenance” has to be connected to “governance.” In the redevelopment of Columbia Point, Boston, the development company signed an agreement that split the management responsibilities with the residents — 50/50 control. The traditional problem with public housing has been that people would maintain the inside of their dwellings, but there was no collective capacity to take responsibility for the outside. The “defensible space” solution was to privatize or do away with public areas as much as possible — a step expressed in the project’s geometry. That, however, led to increasing isolation and a fundamental change towards an introverted society.

A sense of obligation

The better solution is simply a pattern of well-defined distinctions between public and private realms, PLUS a collective capacity to take responsibility for the public space. Some of that capacity has to do with design that facilitates “eyes on the street” (front porches, windows, etc.) but the eyes on the street only matter if they are backed up by conditions of trust, reciprocity, and collective efficacy. People often forget that Jane Jacobs’ neighborhood worked not only because people could watch the street, but also because people had a sense of obligation as members of a certain kind of community (Jacobs, 1961). She described a characteristic of social environments that is now talked about in terms of “social capital”. This is how one creates an effective “code of responsibility”. If you try to impose it (as the housing authorities often do), then you get widespread noncompliance in the face of which no enforcement mechanism (no matter how intrusive) will work.

Ownership of homes does seem to be a good thing to encourage, from all the evidence. However, it is not true that renters can’t be held accountable for maintaining their environment. Owners can be held accountable in so far as they have equity in their house, which means that they are motivated by concern for the exchange value embodied in their property. Renters can also have a stake in a place, but only if the social relationships involved are not reduced to the cold cash nexus — that is, a certain amount of square footage for a certain monthly fee. It is possible (and often happens) that renters can build up their “investment” in the use value of a place, depending on the extent to which they benefit from the specific networks of social relations that define the neighborhood. (Notice that Jane Jacobs’ neighborhood wasn’t a neighborhood of owners.)

It is also important to include a mix of rental and home ownership opportunities. Not everybody wants to encumber themselves with the responsibilities of home ownership, and not everybody can afford to maintain a house. One of the things accomplished in “social housing” should be that the everyday costs of housing are socialized, and not just the purchase price. Think about the way the co-housing movement has done the same thing. 

Some of the ideas from the co-housing movement might be incorporated in helping to insure maintenance. For those unfamiliar with this term, co-housing refers to a cluster of houses around shared common land, which usually includes a shared building for meetings and common meals — see Pattern 37: HOUSE CLUSTER in Alexander et al. (1977). In our experience, the pattern works best when middle-class residents are strongly linked by common religious belief, as in Israeli Kibbutzim or some Christian sects. On the other hand, having poverty in common is not by itself a sufficient unifying factor!