Designed Self-Help: Producing Closed Forms for Open Buildings

Designing Self-help sounds like a contradiction in terms. Indeed, a great deal of the scholarly accounts on self-help housing excludes the agency of the designer, stressing instead the roles of the policy maker and the owner-builder. In the architecture discipline, from the late 1950s through the 1980s the notions of open form, group form and...

The SAAL Spring: Revolution, Housing and Bureaucracy in Portugal

Through almost half-century, the politics of social housing championed by the totalitarian regime that ruled Portugal from 1928 until 1974 was designed to mitigate conflicts. With the revolutionary coup of April 25th 1974, this state of affairs would change swiftly but not lastingly. In the two eventful years of Portugal’s transition to a...

From the Kebele to the Condominium: Accommodating Social and Spatial Practices in Ethiopia's Politics of Affordable Housing

One decade ago in the capital city of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, more than 80% of its four million inhabitants lived in the so-called kebele houses, which are the local variant of a well-known urban figure, the slum. In order to cope with the housing backlog sparked by the need to replace the dilapidated kebele houses, to accommodate the city’s...

'Bread & butter and architecture': Accommodating the everyday

Engagement and Estrangement: Participation and Disciplinary Autonomy in Álvaro Siza’s S. Victor Neighbourhood

Citizens’ participation in the design process has been discussed since the aftermath of World War II as an instrument to promote a more humanist approach to habitat. However, it has been also accused of fostering populist outcomes where the designer is merely the hand of the people, challenging the traditional limits of architecture’s...