the INCREMENTAL house

In the summer of 2011, I was able to return to Nairobi, as a team member of Mathare Valley slum-upgrading program.  I stopped by the Kambimoto upgrading project that I had documented in the summer of 2008, and found that it has continued to grow, adapt, and change. The Kambimoto project was a result of many years of diligent work by Pamoja Trust working with a small slum in the Mathare Valley, north of Nairobi.  The resulting housing was incremental, where each family started with a basic one bedroom, one-story space that could eventually be expanded vertically up to three stories.  In 2008, the project was still under construction, although many units had been completed and families had moved in.  In 2011, the entire project was still under development due to lack of funds, but many individual units had been expanded and the overall space had been transformed significantly.

Looking down at Tahrir Square (Source: http://liveblogs.globalnews.ca) It has been extraordinary to watch the events in Egypt unfold in the last few days. In some ways, it is absolutely shocking to see the extent to which ordinary citizens have shed their fear of the government. Yet, on the other hand, it is amazing that it has taken this long. Having navigated the complete chaos of the city , visited and met citizens living in deep poverty and unimaginable living conditions, and finally watching new cities for the wealthy develop on the outskirts of Cairo, it became clear to me how broken Egyptian society had become.

On my first day back, I went on some house visits with one of the nurses at the local health clinic, and spent the day looking at some rooms where I could stay for a month. Wandering around Senkata, it still feels like a ghost town. Is this what was recently considered the fastest growing city in Latin America ? Where is everyone? Knocking on doors, it became very clear that many people were away, working….somewhere. Probably in La Paz . Returning to La Paz from El Alto, we passed a massive line of people waiting for transportation back to El Alto. The people have to live so far away to make a living in the modern metropolis. It is a taxing journey packed into small vehicles, dodging traffic and everything else. Even though, people are hidden behind the walls of their homes. The nurse told me that people are afraid of thieves. I wonder what applications Jane Jacob’s ‘eyes on the street’ has here. If the public and private realms were more permeable and peo...

Varying facades 5 years later Before and after facades on Galvanrino St. Elevation on Pedro Prado. This project served as one of the inspirations for my initial proposal on incremental housing. By looking at how architects could play a significant role in helping people improve their housing without taking away their agency, the architectural group ELEMENTAL, in conjunction with the Chilean government, has contributed significantly to the discourse of social housing. The first project in Iquique, on a site called Quinta Monroy explored the question of how to provide a basic quality house, for only $7,500. Their answer was to provide half of the house. And if only half, which half would it be? Working closely with a community of squatters that had lived precariously on an urban site, the architects developed a set of rules, by which people could still have a lot of capacity to live their lives and have their homes express that. The rules ensured that each unit...