Working with potential future residents
The body of this paper really outlines a method of methods, which can be used to format an infinite number of different approaches. All the approaches arising from our recommendations share a common adaptivity to human sensibilities. In this essential quality, however, they differ markedly from other methods currently in use. Evidently, a planner has to make up a new method that best suits local conditions and exigencies.
For readers who wish to implement our method with the least delay, we outline here a procedure that can produce housing on vacant land. A slightly different approach is needed to work on a site that has existing buildings, and yet another to reconfigure an existing settlement. Please remember that this represents only ONE of an infinite number of related methods satisfying our criteria, and should not be adopted as a universal set of rules.
We assume that a team of planners will work with some or all of potential future residents in all steps of the layout. This is crucial to get a “reading” of the necessary human factors that must be addressed. Actual building is divided into two components: those that are the funding agency’s responsibility, and those that are to be done by the owner/resident. A rough division of labor is for the government to undertake all construction on public space, whereas the owner/resident builds his/her own house; but these responsibilities can overlap either way according to the specific situation. Even if the owners/residents are going to do all the building work on their house, the planning team is prepared to support them and guide them through the process. References below are to individual patterns in A Pattern Language (Alexander et al., 1977).
It is extremely important to make an initial statement that we have here a different type of approach to social housing, and planning in general. The novelty of this approach is evident in three of our procedures. First, we begin with laying out the ground and street network with active user participation, not as a pre-conceived plan drawn somewhere else. The second unusual element is to allow (in fact, actively encourage) the users to ornament the sidewalk in front of their house, before the house is even built. The third unusual element is to build the urban space before any of the houses have been completed. The urban space is going to define the character of the settlement as a whole — its spatial quality and identity on the large scale — more than any other built object. It is going to play a major role in whether the residents feel they own the place emotionally.
A vernacular building tradition is the most efficient solution to the world’s housing problem. Turning away from the promise of industrial methods applied on a massive scale, we focus once again on the small scale and owner/user self-building. Certainly, the government or non-governmental organizations are needed to help in providing infrastructure, advice, materials, and some modular units such as bathroom or kitchen units, but otherwise we should leave the people to build their houses themselves.
The authors make these recommendations based upon considerable experience in practical projects. We will be the first to urge making compromises and needed adaptations in implementing our methodology to any particular project, in the spirit of incremental adaptation. It is far better to compromise and get something built, rather than to insist on following every component of our suggested process but have the project rejected. In this way, we can effect a steady transition to a more robust, more life-supporting, and more sustainable kind of housing for the future.
Is a Changed World Ready to Accept Humane Social Housing?
Projects all over the world were built following the organic paradigm, using owner participation. We observe a cyclic phenomenon: both governments and non-governmental organizations support parts of what we (and others before us) propose, then it falls out of favor and is replaced with inhuman modernist typologies, then it sometimes makes a comeback as elected officials and agency directors change. This temporal fluctuation reflects the model of species competition, where one competing species displaces another (but does not drive it to extinction). When conditions change, that species makes a modest comeback.
The organic urban paradigm has always been only marginally accepted by the powers-that-be, even though it represents the vast majority of currently built urban fabric. In the ecological analogy, unplanned owner-built housing is actually the dominant species, whereas in the minds of most people (in blatant contradiction of fact), it is assumed to be the minority species. The world’s urban population explosion has occurred in the poorest strata of society, one minor part housed by top-down mechanisms of social housing, while the other major part had to emerge as favelas (irregular settlements). It is this imbalance — between overwhelming forces generating the world’s irregular urban morphology, and ineffective attempts to impose order — that we wish to correct with this paper. We depend upon three hopeful strategies:
(a) Readers will see that some of the old prejudices against owner-built housing are outdated, and are economically and socially wasteful.
(b) People will recognize the roots of this conflict as ideological, and not as exclusively legal.
(c) We finally have very powerful tools for efficient design and repair, which were not available in the past.
The New Urbanism movement (spearheaded by one of the authors (AMD)) has helped to awaken the world to the value of traditional urbanism, and to the need of preserving existing portions of living urban fabric. Our approach tries to channel the natural human need for a nourishing and sustainable living environment, which has been the case during several millennia of human existence. Several extremely successful New Urbanist developments have been built in a traditional character, showing that it can be done today. Planning is no longer biased towards the modernist vision.
There exists a new awareness, at least in the most economically developed countries. Whereas in the 1960s healthy middle-class neighborhoods were destroyed with impunity (an act euphemistically labeled “urban renewal” (Jacobs, 1961)), such urban aggression is less likely to succeed today. Still, that does not prevent die-hard modernists from trying to publicly discredit the New Urbanism by labeling it as fit only for the very rich. The present paper is one of many proofs (if any were needed) that the same techniques apply to house the poor of the world.
People have always had an INSTINCTIVE knowledge of how to build, but all that was casually dismissed by modernist typologies falsely claiming an exclusively rational “scientific” validity. With the recent entry of trained scientists into architecture and urbanism, that misunderstanding has finally been dispelled, and we can separate genuine method from image-driven dogma. Our courageous predecessors who built living urban fabric were all stymied by an architectural establishment convinced of the absolute correctness of the early 20th Century industrial design paradigm. Again and again, projects and ideas were marginalized, and had to be re-invented elsewhere and at another time. We believe that our age is finally ready to accept living urban fabric as part of life itself, and that this idea can assume its proper central place in our consciousness.