Housing Innovation and the Global Foreign Aid Agenda in Addis Ababa (1964-1993)

Since the Bretton Woods agreement of 1944, housing has often been part of the foreign aid agenda of international agencies and non-governmental organisations. Housing concepts included in the development aid “packages” were often used to introduce new political ideas and economic paradigms that would affect dramatically the livelihoods of the...

Incremental Housing: A Short History of an Idea

This text presents an historical review of incremental housing approaches. It examines the different terminologies related with the production of housing and the design of house types that can accommodate growth and change through time. This historical account analyzes policies, narratives, and practices based on the progressive social and...

Building Together: Citizens' participation in the urban renewal of The Hague (Netherlands) in the l980s

From House to Home: Social Control and Emancipation in Portuguese Public Housing, 1926–76

In From House to Home: Social Control and Emancipation in Portuguese Public Housing, 1926–76, Nelson Mota considers public housing policies in Portugal under the dictatorship that ruled there from 1926 to 1974 and during the two years that followed the democratic revolution of April 1974. He reviews key legislative initiatives and projects to...

Álvaro Siza’s Negotiated Code: Housing with Citizens’ Participation in the Urban Renewal of The Hague in the 1980s

In the 1970s, the participation of citizens in processes of urban renewal was championed by several North-European municipalities as an attempt to re-connect housing policies with their social significance. The main goal was to bring together the city and its citizens, collective interests and individual aspirations. Citizens’ participation was...

The European City as a Place of Coexistence

The European urban institutions have always negotiated a balance between collective control and individual initiative. However, over the last seven decades this balance has been challenged. In the aftermath of World War II, the utopia of the functional city was hijacked to serve the welfare policies of the states sponsored by the Marshall Plan....

Banks, Sweat and Shelter in Addis Ababa: Sites and Services in Performance

In the 1970s and 1980s the politics of international development aid keenly promoted planned progressive development strategies as the primal method to produce affordable housing for the urban poor. Through this period, the World Bank used the so-called “sites and services” program to encourage staged development, flexibility, and the use of...