Search for Quality
Housing solutions in informal areas of Global South, cases of PREVI and Empower Shack
AA / MArch 2022
Cities in a Transnational World
Supervisors: Jorge Fiori, Giorgio Talocci, Elena Pascolo
Student: Anna Shpuntova
Introduction
In the context of constantly increasing urban population nowadays and its intensification, the problem of housing shortage, particularly in the developing world is more pressing than ever. More than half of the world population today lives in cities. In India alone, it is estimated that, within the next two decades, 380 million people will migrate from rural areas into metropolises)1. Additionally, there are the so called informal2 areas which house account for 29 percent of 3.45 billion people who live in cities today3. It means that there is an ongoing search for appropriate urban planning and architectural tools that would allow to address these issues from the spatial disciplines’ point of view. While scaling up is one of the key objectives due to the skyrocketing urban population, reaching scale is not just a matter of quantity, but also of quality. This essay explores the debate around informal areas through the prism of architecture and urban design to understand how notion of design quality was reconceptualised over time. It will explore how governments, private sector and citizens themselves addressed the housing shortage issue. I will use the case of PREVI4 in Lima, Peru as an example of a project that demonstrates how spatiality and sophisticated design do make a difference in the question of quality when it comes to housing. I will analyse the specific qualities of the project and environment in which it originated to question what can be learnt from the PREVI experience today; and understand, whether its success can be replicated in other political, architectural and geographical conditions.
Context
During the post-WW2 years, in the 1950s-1960s the countries in the Global South were trying to replicate the experience of the Developed World addressing the problem of acute housing shortage which was present at the time. Cities and urban planning became central to the process of modernisation. However, in the case of the Global South areas, the state had to play an important role in the modernisation process due to the weakness of the local capitalist class. It had the power of kickstarting and investing its resources in new housing projects. In general, scaling up and modernist planning were fundamentally associated with master planning: mass-produced standardised large scale housing which was expected to be urbanised in the future via infrastructural elements. It also went hand in hand with the need for eradication of areas that didn’t conform to the understanding of a formal city.
In the 1970s a concept of informal was introduced by Keith Harth5. In his work he gave account of economic activities happening ‘outside the rules’, associated with the survival strategies of the poor. Those which were not registered in the economic statistics of their countries but still generated income. The concept of informal quickly became widely appropriated by urban disciplines and incorporated into the understanding of urban conditions in general. It became identified with areas of low productivity, conditions of social need, poverty, etc. Of course such areas had existed in the cities before the introduction of this term. However, what was changing was the attitude of spatial disciplines towards such parts of the cities. ‘What was new was the perception that the spaces of informality were not devoid of potential but in fact full of resourcefulness and creativity which required support rather than eradication’6.
John Turner
In particular, the informal city and its potential were central to the work of John Turner, who advocated for and studied unconventional housing policies, self-built practices learning from the culture of squatter settlements. There were several key objectives within John Turner’s work. He claimed that the radical rethinking of the standards concept was key for reduction of construction costs. This could allow even the poorest of the poor to afford the housing. Turner questioned the idea that high structural standards should mean more in the housing construction than high space standards. In this con-
1 Alfredo Brillembourg, Hubert Klumpner, Daniel Schwartz, “Build simply: South of the border”. MAS Context no.10 (2011): 16.
2 The concept of ‘informal’ first emerged in the work of Keith Hart, who explored the economies happening outside the rules and associated with survival strategies of the poor. The essay will elaborate on the term further.
3 Brillembourg, Build simply, 16.
4 PREVI – Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (Experimental Housing Project).
5 Keith Hart, “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana”, The Journal of Modern African Studies 11, no. 1 (1973): 61–89, doi:10.1017/S0022278X00008089.
6 Jorge Fiori, “Informal city. Design as political engagement”. In Masterplanning the Adaptive City. Computational Urbanism in the Twenty-First Century, ed.Tom Verebes (New York : Routledge, 2013): 40.
text, in the special AD issue of 1963 Turner quoted Patrick Geddes 7: ‘the essential need of a house and family is room, and the essential improvement of a house for its family is more room’. Unrealistic modern housing standards8 created according to the developed countries’ example, required large investments and often mortgage loans which made it unaffordable for the low-income population. The understanding of housing as a progressive development extending over years contributed to this argument: the initial expenses could be much lower allowing for change over time.
Another key point for which Turner argued was the importance of placing the end users in the heart of the housing production. It meant that ‘the households should be free to choose their own housing, to build or direct its construction if they wish, and to use and manage it in their own ways’9. One of the reasons for this is what was mentioned by several researches conducting work on informal areas and self-built practices. Ability to take control over such important decisions like building your own dwelling, contribute to the design, declaring ownership over land — all this influences greatly the social well-being of the users; in these opportunities they find source of pride and way of self-identification10. Turner also believed that land ownership should belong to the tenants.
Despatialisation
Later, during the 1970s, the self-help approach put forward by Turner shaped the dominant housing strategies of international agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank. The World Bank was one of the key actors11 in the mentioned period promoting and financing site-and-service12 and slum upgrading programmes, starting in El Salvador and Zambia and then going on in other countries. One of the reasons why such unconventional policies of self-built and siteand-service gained popularity in the context of the Global South, was a massive wave of criticism of modernist policies and practices. It blamed architects and spatial disciplines in the failures of the previous periods. The conventional standardised mass-housing approaches besides not being able to cope with the growing housing demand13, also ‘failed to accommodate the household economies considered necessary for survival by low-income groups (horticulture, the use of residence as a workplace, subletting as a source of income)’14. In the new paradigm, the power of decision-making was supposed to be shifted from the market and state to individuals, the end-users.
However, this shift had its major implications on the spatial disciplines and role of the design in developing cities. New focus changed to socioeconomic and political aspects of the informal processes and housing was understood more and more as a complex object of analysis, it became more strategic. As a result, it dematerialised and housing as an object of study became almost absent from the debate: ‘Policies that attempted to combine state-driven, low-cost ‘site-and-service' and ‘slum upgrading’ programs and projects with community participation, led almost invariably to introverted, disconnected,
7 In one of his key works "Freedom to build" Turner mentioned Geddes as the person whose work guided his deschooling and reeducation as he escaped into the real world.
8 From the article "Housing as a verb" by John Turner: ‘Almost all official codes, in the wealthiest and poorest countries alike, require that a building plot be fully equipped with modern utilities, and even paved streets and sidewalks, before it may be sold to a would-be home builder’, 148-149
9 John Turner, Freedom to build: dweller control of the housing process (London Collier-Macmillan, 1972), 154.
10 John Turner, Catherine S. Turner, Patrick Crooke, “Dwelling resources in South America”, Architectural Design 8, (1963), and Bill Chambers, “The Barriadas of Lima: Slums of Hope or Despair? Problems or Solutions?”, Geography 90, no. 3, (2005), and Fernando García-Huidobro, Diego Torres Torriti, Nicolás Tugas, “The Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima: The Making of a Neighbourhood”, Architectural Design 81, no.3 (2011).
11 ‘By far the most important of the international development agencies in this period was the World Bank, particularly under the presidency of Robert McNamara, when a systematic attempt was made to elaborate the broader goals of the RWG (redistribution with growth) strategies at the sectorial lending level and to use the leverage of the ‘matching funds’ system to implement self-help housing policies throughout the Third World.’ Rod Burgess, “Helping Some to Help Themselves”, In Beyond self-hep housing, ed. Kosta Mathey (Munchen : Profil Verlag ; London : Mansell, 1992): 78.
12 Site-and-services approach meant offering extensive sites often occupying peripheral land, with very basic services like power and water provided by the state and expected to develop and consolidate later over time.
13 Prof. Caroline Moser, and Dr. Alfredo Stein, New Formal Housing Policies: Building Just Cities? (Manchester: University of Manchester, 2014), 2.
14 Burgess, Helping some to help themselves, 78.
and fragmented interventions devoid of any sense of urbanism or of the city itself’15
In the middle of the modernist failures critique, despatialisation of the debate and search for bottom-up innovative approaches, an international competition for a new neighbourhood in Lima took place in 1969. This project was thought of as an incremental housing alternative for squatter settlements spreading quickly in Peru in 1960s. These informal settlements in the Peruvian context are called Barriadas. They grew unprecedentedly fast due to accelerated migration in its turn provoked by a number of reasons16 (fig. 1). Between 1940 and 1972, the number of Lima inhabitants increased by approximately 500 percent, and the number of squatters grew from 1 percent to 25 per cent of the total population17. The state could not deal with the rising housing demand and the barriada ‘turned into the most extensive system of (sub)urbanisation in Lima’. In the 1960-1984 period, the self-building of houses was 47 times greater than the production of state social housing18 Looking back at the work of John Turner, it is important to note that the architect worked in Peru with different government agencies between 1957 and 1965. For him barriadas were a very promising source which one could learn from. Their qualities and building methods could provide solution for the increasing informal population in Peru and other countries of the Global South. Further, the essay will elaborate more on how the PREVI project incorporated into its core the main objectives advocated for by John Turner, like land ownership and transformation power in hands of the dwellers.
PREVI, Lima
The International architectural competition for the PREVI project ideas was initiated by the president of Peru, Fernando Belaunde in 1965. An architect himself, he put forward an idea to shift from the high and mid-rise housing projects to another model. The former proved themselves insufficient in attempts to tackle the housing shortage and comply with the speed of barriadas extensions. He proposed to take into consideration the same patterns as the dwellers of barriadas did: a low rise-high density model and use state-of-the-art technology to build homes economically and on massive scale19. The target of this project were low-income families who qualified for a low interest loan20. Thanks to the Savings & Loans Associations in Peru, they could purchase a low-cost house and a plot of land.
The competition was supported and co-financed by the UN Development Project and the list of participants was rather exquisite. It gathered 26 architects from all over the world and involved the most famous names like James Stirling, Aldo van Eyck, Atelier 5, Kiyonori Kikutake, Kisho Kurokawa, Fumihiko Maki etc. As it was put by Justin McGuirk: ‘It was a housing Olympiad of sorts. Never again did so many prominent architects weigh in on the issue of social housing’21. The aim was to consolidate as much international professional experience on social housing and architecture in general as possible, and to represent as many nations as possible. The leadership of the whole project was in hands of a British architect Peter Land22.
The project was not realised as a holistic master plan by one author as it was planned initially, due to various cir-
15 Fiori, Masterplanning the adaptive city, 40.
16 ‘Migration started in early twentieth century following earthquakes in the Andes; it continued to be a push factor although Lima itself is as vulnerable to this hazard as any rural or Andean location. Among other factor were the limitations in legal economic opportunities outside Lima apart from mines, which made ambitious young people migrate to the opportunities of Lima.’ Chambers, The Barriadas of Lima, 204.
17 Sharif Kahatt, “PREVI – Lima’sTime: Positioning Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda in Peru’s Modern Project”, in Architectural Design no. 211, (2011): 23.
18 Fernando García-Huidobro, Diego Torres Torriti, Nicolás Trugas, ¡El tiempo construye! : el Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) de Lima : génesis y desenlace = Time builds! : the Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima : genesis and outcome (Barcelona : G. Gili, 2008), 38-39.
19 Felix Madrazo, Juan Pablo Corvalan, Manuel de Rivero, “And Previ”, Supersudaca Reports (Supplement to Volume 21, 2009).
20 Josep Lluís Mateo, Marianne Baumgartner, Tomeu Ramis, Peter Land, “PREVI Lima 1969 Experimental Housing Project Revisited”, TRANSFER Global Architecture Platform, February 9, 2016, http://www.transfer-arch.com/reference/previ-lima-1969/.
21 Justin McGuirk, “PREVI: The Metabolist Utopia”, Domus, April 21, 2011, https://www.domusweb.it/en/architecture/2011/04/21/ previ-the-metabolist-utopia.html.
22 Peter Land is a British architect graduated from the Architectural Association and Yale, who first went to Peru in 1960. He went to Lima in 1965 to work for Untied Nations and then stayed as the main advisor of PREVI until 1973.
cumstances, description of which is beyond the scope of this essay23. Instead, Peter Land was responsible for composing a master-plan including all architectural projects proposed for the competition, what German Samper Gnecco later called: ‘a modern Babel Tower’24.
There are several key points that are distinctive about the PREVI project.
1. The notion of layering and collage which has multiple translations. The master-plan in general can be seen as a patchwork. It consists of 24 different architectural projects. It is an extensive variety of typologies all composed into a larger whole, working as a single organism (fig.5). Another layer on top is the one that was added over years: ‘further layer of interest and value’25. It was possible thanks to the incremental character of the project. PREVI from the very beginning was understood as a platform for future expansion and gradual adaptation over time to suit for changing family needs. In each project this change was essentially anticipated in the original design26. Every dweller had an opportunity to make decisions about anything that was left for interpretation by the architects: structural elements, design, materials, ways of extension etc. ‘This was perhaps the first act that recognised the value of the dynamics of growth adopted in the informal slums’27.
2. The opportunity to extend and alter the dwellings according to the domestic, spatial and family needs meant freedom for domestic economy. A chance to incorporate rental units or start small businesses in their dwellings, or generate unexpected programmatic changes — converting housing into shops, schools, nurseries, etc. (fig.6) Subsequently, the initial capital of the resident and property value increased. This encouraged the following generations to remain in the same neighbourhood, adjusting houses to their new aspirations and improved financial situation. Generally, it prevented the cycle of deterioration and limiting the neighbourhood to low-income families, which is a case for so many informal areas28.
3. Another important layer is related to the public realm of the neighbourhood. The collective space did not only comprise a park and a central pedestrian street (axial ‘alameda’), but a complex flowing system of interconnected plazas29, learning from Lima’s traditional ones: church atria, paseos and alamedas. This system, besides enhancing social interaction in the neighbourhood and serving as a pedestrian route system, also incorporated the private courtyards or patios which could be found in every house (fig.7). This blurred the line between the collective and private realms rethinking the notion of the threshold. Altogether, pedestrian paths, system of plazas and housing create a succession of spaces ‘conducive to strolling around’30 (fig. 2-4)
4. General urban order and multiscalarity of the project. One of the most important qualities that in my view played a role in the success of PREVI is its sophisticated integration into a wider urban fabric. At the moment of creation, the project was basically built in the middle of a desert. Nevertheless, the plot was adjacent to the Pan-American Highway and connected to it, which meant a link to Lima metropolitan area, its public transportation routes and job opportunities. On the scale of a neighbourhood, PREVI remained car-free. But, as mentioned earlier, it had a well-connected pedestrianised system of public areas, access for services and collective infrastructure also available for non-locals. The best way to assess the quality
23 Nevertheless the author must point out that the most important disruption in the initially planned flow of the project happened due to political circumstances: in 1968 a military coup replaced the democratic government of Fernando Belaunde with a military junta. Due to these events the project had to be put on hold. It resumed 3 years later but was never completed in the scope anticipated in the beginning.
24 Peter Land, PREVI p 29
25 Josep Lluís Mateo, “PREVI Experience”, TRANSFER Global Architecture Platform, February 9, 2016, http://www.transfer-arch.com/ reference/previ-lima-1969/.
26 Ibid.
27 McGuirk, PREVI; the Metabolist Utopia.
28 García-Huidobro, The Making of a Neighbourhood.
29 According to its size, each plaza was to be used by between 6 and 18 homes in a ratio that promotes collective appropriation and the care and maintenance of the public space.
30 Marianne Baumgarten, TRANSFER Global Architecture Platform, February 9, 2016, http://www.transfer-arch.com/reference/previ-lima-1969/.
Education
Grocery shop
Fruit shop
Fancy dress shop
Restaurant Education
Internet center
Bookshop
Photocopies
6: Unlike in case of site-and-service projects, the variety of services and programmes beside housing in PREVI is quite extensive. Most of
8-10: Over time not only have the houses been changed and extended by the forces of the residents, but the collective realm has also significantly developed, especially the landscape area. Perhaps it also was possible because the maintenance of the public areas was carried out by everyone in the neighbourhood. There is no strict distinction between the private and the collective in this sense.
of this integration is to look at what PREVI looked like 30-40 years after its completion. It ‘forms part of the overcrowded suburb and has been swallowed up by the constantly growing agglomeration of Lima, incorporated into the endless urban fabric of the city’31.
Lessons to be learnt
I would claim that the PREVI project is a sum of many parts, majority of which were unpredictable and variables in their nature. Not everything went as planned in this project, and the rules had to be changed to facilitate it. For example, a special legislation had to be approved by the Peruvian government for the project to reach the density goal32. In the end, PREVI is a product of exceptional circumstances, from the composition of the competition participants to its experimental nature and level of incrementality incorporated into the concept. It was an ‘anomaly, containing so many design ideas, diverse and adaptable’33 that we can’t imagine replicating it in full today. However, the architectural discipline can still learn from the PREVI project a lot to incorporate it into its approach towards not only informal areas development, but housing in general. It is even more valuable because it emerged during the period when ‘what has been gained in the production of massive housing solutions has been lost in terms of generating a more sustainable, integrated and interrelated city’34, when quality of architecture itself and urban integration were forgotten in favour of tackling housing shortage. The project brought the design quality and spatiality to the foreground and in the end of the day it made a huge difference. What was then this quality and good design?
In his book on PREVI Peter Land states: ‘The best investment for the future for economic social housing and urbanism is a clear, well-thought-out policy, which recognises that design — density, energy, transport, environmental quality, landscape and human scale — are all interconnected’35. I would also add other components: architecture as it is, in all its typological richness (in case of PREVI vast flexibility as well) and involvement of multiple actors. PREVI reflects today the identity of the inhabitants and the area itself in a form of ‘genuine authentic vernacular’36. And it became possible due to the well designed architecture supported by involvement of dwellers in the initial stages of the project. Distinctive was also the way PREVI built effective ties with the city and learnt from the typologies and methodologies already present around it. All these qualities together is what substituted the notion of high quality in the case of PREVI and secured its successful development over time.
What about today? Urban-Think Tank.
The work and ideology of Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, founders of the Urban-Think Tank design practice from Caracas, can be an example of how ideas similar to ones promoted by John Turner and in PREVI, are being implemented in informal areas in the 21-st century. Their approach has ‘realisable micro-projects’ as opposed to grand master plans in its heart. They also believe that the ‘democratisation of the planning process and exchange between local conditions, populations and multi-disciplinary experts’37 are key to a successful urban planning process.
Apart from infrastructural and cultural projects like the Caracas Metro Cable, Vertical Gym, schools38, etc., the practice worked on the ‘Empower Shack’ social housing development in Khayelitsha, South Africa, in collaboration with the local NGO Ikhayalami. The typology of the architecture learned from constructions and materiality of shacks, a typical dwelling common for the local informal settlements (fig.11). The focus was on clearing up space for additional collective areas by extending the units vertically rather than horizontally; providing them with basic sanitation amenities and improving the safety standards of the buildings. Moreover, a very important part of the development lied in its incremental character, involvement of the residents on all stages (fig.12). It was also facilitated by economical tools: the government offered resi-
31 Ibid.
32 Peter Land, The Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima : design and technology in a new neighborhood = El Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) Lima : Diseno y tecnologia en un nuevo barrio (Bogota: Universidad de los Andes, 2015), 12.
33 McGuirk, PREVI; the Metabolist Utopia.
34 Moser, New Formal Housing Policies, 7.
35 Land, PREVI: design and technology, 14.
36 Ibid., 18.
37 Brillembourg, Build simply, 16
38 Urban-Think Tank website, https://uttdesign.com.
dents a subsidy corresponding with the price of construction, and they could pay for the dwellings through a micro-finance programme.
Judging by the qualities this project offers today, we can see how housing is not seen as finished project, but it is flexible and open for change delivered by the owners over time. This in its turn secures economical sustainability of the projects. Just like in the PREVI case, it helps to keep the future generations from leaving the area. The assumption is that it will stay vibrant, extend its programmatic set and improve the overall quality of residents’ life. Additionally, unlike in the case of Lima, the potential tenants of the Shack are trained by the professionals and therefore can conduct the upgrading and self-building processes with higher quality living standards and amenities39. In the PREVI project ‘the Peruvian Institute for Housing Research and Standards did not receive the political and economic support to carry out the job of assisting occupants with the extending of their dwellings. Without understanding the constructional logic of their house, the occupants were obliged to extend it with their own economic resources and with traditional systems existing on the market, by appropriating, in certain cases, public urban space’40. In its turn it sometimes led to adjustments that were not always safe from environmental or from structural point of view.
Of course, the scale and budget of the Empower Shack project is far from what we could see in the PREVI example. However, its strategy includes several important elements that would allow the development to scale up in the future. Government involvement, thought-through managerial aspect, financial scheme are aimed at providing access to diverse housing for South Africa’s gap market41. The project approached the question of incrementality carefully and did not leave the users to deliver and sustain the dwellings on their own.
Conclusion
We can see how the notion of quality in architectural and urban development projects was translated in different settings over time. From mass housing solutions of the modernist planning to the PREVI which valued architectural quality and involved users in the design process. Or more contemporary Empower Shack case which demonstrates interest in housing as an evolving process rather than a defined and finished object. Reflecting on the conducted research, I would claim that to achieve high housing quality, we are not ‘condemned’ to work under supervision of top-rank architects or create exceptional conditions. Of course, delivering socially responsible urban planning and good quality architectural solutions requires a high level of effort, professional knowledge and resources. It should involve multiple parties ranging from government, private sector and NGOs to residents. However, important ingredients for inclusive, high-quality design can be found also in ‘ordinary’ circumstances. And projects delivered by practices like Urban-Think Tank demonstrate it. Backed up by admitting the potential of informal areas and value of users’ perspective.
39 Daniel Schwartz, “Empower Shack. Residential”, Danish Architecture Center, accessed April 30, 2022, https://dac.dk/en/knowledgebase/ architecture/empower-shack/.
40 Fernando García-Huidobro, Diego Torres Torriti, Nicolás Trugas, ¡El tiempo construye! : el Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda (PREVI) de Lima : génesis y desenlace = Time builds! : the Experimental Housing Project (PREVI), Lima : genesis and outcome (Barcelona : G. Gili, 2008), 154.
41 India Block, “Urban-Think Tank develops low-cost housing for South African slum”, Dezeen, December 28, 2017, https://www.dezeen. com/2017/12/28/empower-shack-urban-think-tank-low-cost-housing-khayelitsha-south-africa/.
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Table of figures:
Fig.1: Chambers, Barriadas.
Fig.2: By author.
Fig.3: By author.
Fig.4: By author.
Fig.5: Land, PREVI : design and technology in a new neighborhood.
Fig.6: García-Huidobro, Time builds.
Fig.7: By author.
Fig.8: http://www.transfer-arch.com/reference/previ-lima-1969/.
Fig.9: Ibid.
Fig.10: Ibid.
Fig.11: https://www.dezeen.com/2017/12/28/empower-shack-urban-think-tank-low-cost-housing-khayelitsha-south-africa/
Fig.12: http://www.archidatum.com/gallery?id=9243&node=9239#