Elemental's 'ABC of Incremental Housing'

John Hill

6. April 2016

Villa Verde (Photo: Courtesy of Elemental)

At the United Nations yesterday, 2016 Pritzker Prize laureate Alejandro Aravena announced, both during an afternoon press conference and a conversation with six other Pritzker laureates later in the evening, that his firm's plans for incremental housing are being made freely available online.

Visitors to the Elemental website can download the files (in DWG format) for four incremental-housing projects: Lo Barnechea, Monterrey, Quinta Monroy, and Villa Verde. The link is accompanied by a statement (copied below in image and text formats) that is aligned with the ones he has been making around his Pritzker win and his directorship of the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale, which opens at the end of May.

In the "Challenges Ahead for the Built Environment" conversation that took place yesterday evening, and which World-Architects attended, Aravena was accompanied by six previous Pritzker Prize winners who were asked to respond to the title question, "What are the challenges ahead for the built environment?" In a nutshell, Richard Rogers called for architects to be seen as more than "decorators selecting the lipstick for the pig"; Glenn Murcutt sided with the challenge of social and religious prejudice, emotionally describing it in the context of a mosque he designed that is nearing completion; Christian de Portzamparc focused on enclaves, calling them "tomorrow's ghettoes"; Wang Shu called for maintaining links with history, particularly important in his native China; Renzo Piano focused on the need to make places for people on the periphery, stating "the city of the future is the one around the current city"; Jean Nouvel challenged architects to fight so they have a say in the important decisions that go to politicians, bureaucrats, engineers, and others; finally, Alejandro Aravena selected urban migration as the biggest challenge, offering his incremental housing as one means of addressing it and finishing with the statement that the projects' plans are available for download.

"ABC of Incremental Housing" statement (Photo: Courtesy of Elemental)

Elemental's "ABC of Incremental Housing" statement (emphasis in original):

Out of the 3 billion people living in cities today, 1 billion is under the line of poverty. By 2030 out of the 5 billion people that will be living in cities, 2 billion are going to be under the line of poverty. That means that we will have to build a 1 million people city per week with 10,000 dollars per family. Given the magnitude of the housing shortage, we won’t solve this problem unless we add people’s own resources and building capacity to that of governments and market. That is why we thought of putting in place an OPEN SYSTEM able to channel all the available forces at play. In that way people will be part of the solution and not part of the problem.

On the other hand, it is a fact that available resources are not enough[1]. To face such scarcity of means, the market tends to do two things: Reduce and Displace; reduce the size of the houses[2], threatening the quality of life of its inhabitants, and displace them to underserved peripheries where land costs nothing, segregating people from the opportunities that made them come to cities in the first place. In order to face scarcity we propose a principle of INCREMENTALITY.

If you can´t do everything, focus on:
A. What is more difficult
B. What cannot be done individually
C. What will guarantee the common good in the future

We identified 5 design conditions as the ABC of incremental housing:

Good location: dense enough projects able to pay for expensive well located sites.
Harmonious growth in time: build strategically the first half (partition structural and firewalls, bathroom, kitchen, stairs, roof) so that expansion happens thanks to the design and not despite it. Frame individual performances and actions, so that we get a customization instead of deterioration of the neighborhood.
Urban layout: introduce in between private space (lot) and public space (street), the collective space, not bigger than 25 families, so that social agreements can be maintained.
Provide structure for the final scenario of growth (middle class) and not just for the initial one.
Middle-class DNA: plan for a final scenario of at least 72m2 or 4 bedrooms (3x3m) with space for closet or double bed, bathrooms should not be at the front door (which is the typical case to save pipes) but where bedrooms are; they may include a bathtub and not just a shower receptacle and space for washing machine; there should be possibility of parking place for a car. None of this is even close to be the case in social housing nowadays.

In other words, make sure you balance: Low-rise high density, without overcrowding, with possibility of expansion (from social housing to middle class dwelling).

Here you will find 4 examples, with four different designs that pursue the same goals and principles. From now on they are public knowledge, an open source that we hope will be able to rule out one more excuse for why markets and governments don’t move in this direction to tackle the challenge of massive rapid urbanization. These designs may require to be adjusted to comply with local regulations and structural codes, follow local realities and use pertinent building materials. But they are knowledge that we have tested, that has proved to be beneficial to communities and that have been implemented accepting very pressing budget and policy constraints.

[1] In terms of time and money
[2] A middle-class family lives reasonably well in around 70 to 80 m2. When there is not enough money to do a middle class house, in the best of the cases, governments and markets are able to build 30 m2 to 40m2.