With the expression “vita activa” I propose to designate the three fundamental human being activities: labour, work, and action… Of the three activities, action is the only activity that goes on directly between men without the intermediary of things or matter, corresponds to the human condition of plurality, to the fact that men, not a man, live on Earth and inhabit the world.
Hannah Arendt
The world moves forward, develops, and advances at speeds never known before. In this excessive turmoil, architecture tries—timidly—to go along with asymmetrical speeds and partly successful approaches to the most urgent demands. Global overpopulation, resource consumption, lack of water, human displacement, or lock downs because of the pandemic have been recent challenges to which architecture has tried to respond, hesitant and indecisive.
Today’s housing, in its condition as the original cell of the human habitat fabric and the starting point from which the city fabric arises, fulfils a transcendental function in the architectural equation that governs the built space. This decisive function makes it a key argument for the most significant social and political, economic, regulatory and sustainability debates of our time.
The socio-political panorama of the last decades of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century meant, in the post-Cold War panorama, a profound turn towards the exaltation of the individual over the collective development. A turn that gravitates around the idea of a meritocratic society that praises success and social ascent as an aspiration of life. The governments of developed countries focused their social policies on “equality” of opportunities among their citizens to achieve a territory free of competition. This individual and merit-based policy as a justification for success, which makes human beings worthy of their achievements due to their preparation, work, and effort (with its virtues), brings with it a dark side: the society of winners and losers. The winners, self-pleased, are the ones who prepared and accumulated wealth and recognition and the losers are those who do not. This divide between winners and losers has sparked much of the social revolutions of our era, as the former believe that they “deserve” what they have, which makes it difficult to think in terms of empathy for those who did not try hard enough. The losers project a dose of resentment on those who accumulate the merit and profits of globalization and technological advances (Sandel 2020).
The economic consequence of this socio-political trend is that social differences and the gap between wealth and poverty skyrocketed. Thus, the richest 1% of the world’s population owns more than twice as much wealth as 6900 million people, and this is most acutely stressed in developing countries (Oxfam International 2021). Regarding housing, the “winners” of our era—those who knew how to adapt to globalization and the advancement of time—successfully gained much of the housing stock in the world, knew how to manage and accumulate it, putting it at the service of the rest of its citizens. Meanwhile, the “losers”—those who failed to generate enough on their own merits—barely acquired, at best, a lifetime debt associated with the purchase of a small space in which to live. This is a lease scheme that subordinates it vital purpose to become a difficult-to-manage economic transaction, or, with the most socio-economically limited populations in developing countries, an unregulated self-construction scheme lacking decent living conditions.
This social and economic gap forces an urgent and deep reflection on the importance of the collective over the individual, the right over the common good, architecture designed for all and the strength of the collective (men and not man) as a motivator of “common spaces and public places where we learn to negotiate and tolerate our differences, where we come to be interested in the common good” (Sandel 2020, 291).
If we look at the discussions, during the last century and into the present day, on how housing should be built, we find that the urgency of the twentieth-century’s European post-war period was a trigger for the first waves of modern social housing. This social and economic urgency motivated the first and incipient technical advances necessary for the birth of prescriptive standards that served as the starting point for a new way of designing homes. Urban regulations planned construction developments and validated technical documents are a modern representation of former construction treaties which conditioned the design guidelines almost dogmatically. This is a kind of justified self-sufficiency or design complacency, by which following the guides strictly becomes the path for self-recognition and project validation. This over development of technical thinking also causes an outstanding debt to the pressing questions of our time.
Collective consciousness about the finitude of the habitable space and its natural resources also started in the last century, in the 1980s, and became truly visible in this twenty-first century (Biffani 1997). The naturalistic discussions, originally from independent organisations´ concerns, transcended to permeate the political debates of the end of the century with the well-known Earth international summits and the commitments that countries signed to stop the advance of the galloping planet’s deterioration (IUCN, UNEP and WWF 1991). These first efforts highlighted the dichotomy between growth and sustainability, something that seemed antagonistic and unattainable. However, even today, the sustainable territorial development agenda is part of the political debate, to a greater or lesser extent, of governments around the world. Housing is responsible for a large part of carbon dioxide emissions to the environment and, therefore, the countries´ regulations travel a path of inexcusable recognition of construction in terms of mitigation, adaptation, resilience, and sustainability (Martin et al. 2013). This global way of thinking compels a deep reflection on the role of housing in the response to the environmental and social future: the ecological footprint and habitability.
Housing 2.0
Having laid the theoretical foundations of the problem in its different facets, this publication dedicated to housing in the current panorama of uncertainty and challenge becomes a judgment exercise on the legitimate questions that investigate the future with determination and responsibility. These deepen the current diatribes based on two questions: Is current housing projected by and for its inhabitants? Does housing respond to a world in social, political, and environmental crisis?
This issue of the magazine Dearq is a call to look at housing within a world marked by deep latent inequalities. It regards an alternative and understanding of the need to return to the root of the problem and to the deepest reasoning for being housing and its transcendental challenges as a tactical exercise of architecture: the person, as a trigger for living; participatory intervention as a design method; high density as a guarantee of efficient public infrastructure; the flexibility and progressiveness of adaptation to future changes; productivity, through the compatibility of housing uses to reduce changing displacements; affordability, to regenerate the social fabric; the sincere material proposal; housing as an exercise in urban insertion and the renewal of degraded areas of the city; the material and its relationship with the new construction processes and social and environmental sustainability as the main axes of mitigation of the consequences of the built environment.
This complex look, based on the challenges of tomorrow, led to the selection of three architectural projects that support the desired arguments and guide the discussion of each challenge. The detailed journey of these three case studies marks the overall discourse of the text and allows us to visualize how each of the challenges is desirable and, above all, possible.
Housing 2.0 (1): The person, the progressive, the affordable, the material, the replicable and the common
A contest on social housing, such as the one convened in Hidalgo (Mexico), led by a laboratory of research and practical experimentation in housing such as Infoavit (Mexico), triggered pertinent questions and housing experimentation. This imaginary of new opportunities for Latin America, which has happened in the past.1 The promoter of the idea brought together the best minds to think about the architecture of tomorrow in Mexico and, by extension, in Latin America. There were 32 proposals for 32 different locations in the vast territory of Mexico, as a prototype of utopian variations of (small) large changes around a way of inhabiting Latam.
One of these proposals is a project by the Tatiana Bilbao Studio, which proposes a minimum element as a nuclear basis for living. A cell intended for an active, self-contained, and expandable reproduction; a tessellation model of multiplication based on the rhythm between the built and the empty; a kind of inside-out sequence that projects a random and intimate progressivity. The cell is (in)dependent and, with three other (in)dependencies, it forms the basic unit, the stable atom arranged by the tensions of its charge and sign, a set of active members of a family of constructed elements that contain the intimate and that frame the relational in a kind of indissoluble symbiotic composition. However, as if it were an unstable atom, it shows the opposite face free to attract another electron and thus balance, joining another housing unit, in an “oppositional relationship which principles are none other than those that organize both the inner space of the house and the rest of the world, and all the domains of existence” (Bourdieu 2007, 428). Atoms are bonded together with the necessary charge (space) that maintains the right distance, the distance that causes social space. The progressive is, therefore, compatible with the replicable and the common good. In this arrangement of exponential growth, a new imaginary of powerful voids in their right tension becomes the protagonist of development, since the full ones are not replicated, but the voids and the air that keeps the full compensated. This kind of virulent replicability proposes that the social (the empty) be the multiplier agent, and that the intimate (the constructed), be the consequence that accommodates the habitability of the individual, the recognition of the personal. Architecture aiding the search for the propagated common good, the air that becomes the place where the “human condition of plurality” occurs (Arendt 1958, 23), the people meetings two by two, four by four, community by community.
The project also opts for the affordability challenge. A sincere and elementary materiality that responds to its territory and that shows its reality, but is powerful, gives prominence to the accessible versus the presumed: starting is founding, the rest are dreams. From the “affordable initial cell” (the feasible one), imagination and time determine the spatial future of the whole and of its relationships. The affordable thing is to be found, name the space, and mark the rules of growth; that is why this first founding cell, stark and affordable, gives its name to a future of progress, iteration and diverse formal composition for new inhabitants, new voids, new relationships. An architectural plan in complicity with time.
Full and empty and (un)programmed progressivity as a compositional resource with a life of its own to alternate privacy and community in a territory with time. Minimal founder cells as a germ of a replicable affordability. And, finally, the common good as a generator of the form of spatial association, a project that seeks to answer questions of tomorrow.
Housing 2.0 (2): Urban regeneration, the person and the collective, participatory intervention, time, productivity, and compatibility of uses
Within the urban regeneration strategy (brownfields) of the city of Barcelona (NICOLE 2011), in a responsible exercise of circular thinking regarding the industrial land (dis)use, an initiative of people (citizens) arises around some commonplaces of life, some colugares, understood as “those spaces that articulate the public—the city, the urban environment, the neighbourhood—with the private, the house” (Rocca 2011). The disruptive starting point calls into question the commonly established path and dodges the predetermined logics of the market: the pressure of the soil, private property, decision-making and the well-known framework of usual actors in the management of the homes of our time, in what can be considered a legitimate creation that starts from its legitimate users.
To think of a collective or “group of people who have common problems and interests”, 2 is to think of the basic nuclear unit of the human being’s public field. This brings us to Sandel’s (2020) question about the common good and allows us to guess that participatory intervention is perhaps the most democratic way to conceptualize our domestic spaces: the private ones and, above all, the shared ones. First, because it avoids the promotion of homes for ghost users, a priori type users, and second, because it highlights the importance of the factors’ order: initially think why and, above all, for whom the architectural spaces are made before projecting them and even materialising them. This seems a good strategy for the resulting spaces to be places for everyone, flexible and affected by their variable use over time. In the thinking and construction processes, the person (human being) is first, before the house and, therefore, the longings are first and the spaces later, in a kind of magic formula that triggers the sense of belonging and community: “this is my place, and this is my people” (Garriga quoted in Rodríguez Bosh 2020).
The use of ownership, beyond private property, has caused various changing possibilities of the building as an open infrastructure that allows to adapt over time to the needs of its inhabitants. This ownership structure entails a committed alignment of users with community life and consensus for the spatial resources use. It forces continuous interaction and “growth together” around shared space, a committed exercise, in flexibility and coexistence, which promotes productive spaces through the compatibility of communal uses. The project is more a set of relationship rules than the constructed result of a typical linear architectural thought process, since these rules will determine the use over time, managed by the environment, the changing needs and conditions of the inhabitants and their particularities; contrary to the projected: static and default.
The materialisation of a collective project, such as the one presented, is also an opportunity for sustainability in its broadest framework, which affects the social, economic, and environmental spheres. The social sphere, as already described, relates to an intelligent exercise committed to participatory intervention. Regarding the economic sphere, it is a project that considers the purchasing power of its community, to be built in phases, with an initial minimum construction and stark sincere materiality that can be complemented by its users in time. Regarding the environmental sphere, the project is built with passive design strategies, and low footprint and ecological materials. It is thought of as an affordable living container that fights against energy poverty 3 with almost zero consumption and balancing the energy consumed with the one produced.
This is a participatory intervention that deploys the power of collective initiative as a weapon of thought, flexible assertiveness, productive spaces, and compatibility of uses. It is an exercise of urban regeneration that shows that built density can be synonymous with sustainable development.
Housing 2.0 (3): Urban insertion and pendulum displacements, recycling and temporary, material and construction processes
Consolidated cities around the world suffer from a regime of perpetual and unsustainable pendulum mobilities (Direction of Sectoral Analysis and Programming of the Vice Presidency of Infrastructure of CAF 2011). Land pressure in urban centres and the inflexible condition of the real estate forces people to lower their quality of life due to endless displacements. Therefore, this tactical housing project in the city centre is an opportunity for urban insertion that jumps into our imagination, from the anecdotal to the strategic, by magic systemic thinking and scalability. This “simple exercise” becomes a replicable prototype of filling urban centre voids and general spatial remains with this the intelligent urban regeneration opportunity for the future. A vacant corner becomes the ideal place to prototype this filling, the missing piece, which proposes a second life to the terraced house, and which reconstructs the trace of what is left over. This is an architectural exercise that occludes the unconfigured emptiness and that restores the border with morphological acupuncture.
Again, material thinking becomes a replicable conceptual strategy: the reuse of recycled metal structures. These were once mobile spaces to transport goods, that undergo an aesthetic revision to be immobilised and serve as a temporary home for people who move, who come and go as containers do, now static for a while. This round trip between the temporal (us) and the timeless (the building) tackles second chances for recycled materials (and spaces). It is resolved with materials that used to move and today live a second life at the service of city-centre living.
This also tells us about the new ways of facing sustainable and intelligent building construction. It discusses tactical circular economy in search for constructive processes involving assembly and disassembly, connections, and screws. Those processes that allow us to dream that architecture will one day be here, and another day will be gone, leaving a trail of people who temporarily inhabit a place in the city.
Imagining a future. Conclusions
The way to review these architectural projects, looking for a trace of change, is a multiple and complex proposal. It searches the trail of new, more empathetic, and sensitive imaginaries that allows to renew our commitment to the beautiful discipline of projecting places to inhabit. Housing responds, as we have seen, to issues as diverse and transcendental as those related to the everyday, the social, and the affordable, with sustainable approaches and from the unit to the city.
These projects allow us to return to the questions that were raised at the beginning of the exercise: Does housing respond to a world in social, political, and environmental crisis? And especially, is current housing projected by and for its inhabitants?
A new look at housing is necessary to bring us closer to a desirable way of life in an uncertain future. The impact of architecture forces us to focus on innovation towards the planet and its inhabitants, with a complex and systemic look, but above all, with a return to anthropocentric thinking and environmental ethics. Although the three architecture projects reviewed do not seem the completely solve the questions posed, they can cause, at the very least, a tingle, a small hope that the path is marked, and the conviction that well-thought-out and tactical housing design can be the solution.