Omburo: the link between water access, re-housing and mycelium: From too little to too much

Namibia has been home to some of the world’s oldest ethnic groups since the dawn of civilization. One of these cultures is the Himba, often referred to as ‘the last true pastoral nomads’ of Africa. They are known for inhabiting the water scarce desert region of Kunene in Namibia for centuries. Now, various factors, including climate change and...

Backing Incremental Housing: The Role of Social Enterprises assisting Incremental Housing

Top-down solutions toward Incremental Housing have been criticized because the government has imposed unrealistic and unaffordable standards. On a bottom-up approach, Social Enterprises have been recognized for their contribution to global challenges by implementing service and product innovation and their intermediary role in the processes...

Borderscapes: On the Activation of Border Space to Enable Interaction and Accommodate Inclusive Mobility

This thesis reflects on the exclusion of refugees and other migrants from mobility in border space. The research suggests that, while society is becoming increasingly mobile, refugees and other ‘undesired movers’ are excluded from the otherwise unrestricted possibilities to move that have been established across national borders. Following 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...

Kuy-e Narmak (1952–1958): The growth and change of an urban community in Tehran

This article examines the growth and change through time of Kuy-e Narmak, a housing neighbourhood developed in the 1950s under the auspices of Mosaddeq’s Modernization Program. The project was designed by a group of young-leading European-educated Iranian architects that collaborated with the government to develop affordable housing solutions in...

Vertical Mumbai: Development of qualitative social housing in a highly dense city

In the past decades Mumbai has experienced a huge increase of citizens who, drawn by the economic opportunities of the big city, come to Mumbai for chances of a better life. The city is struggling with the effects that this has on the city. A big part of its population reside in informal settlements, living under impoverished circumstances. This...

How Does Work Shape Informal Cities? The Critical Design of Cities and Housing in Brazilian Slums

This essay is conceived as a reaction to the past conference Shaping Cities of the Urban Age at the 2016 Venice Biennale, Reporting from the Front. In light of numerous global crises, urban explosion, housing shortages and rising social movements, contemporary architecture is increasingly being pushed to investigate the social dimension, impact...

Providing a home for the Roma's

My design task was the improvement of a Roma settlement in a post industrial city of Hungary, Ózd. After the change of regime the factory, being the main work source, had closed and since then the population has been decreasing. On the other hand this year the government set up a plan to invest in the city through renovating a significant part...

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...

Responsive Suburbia: Dwelling and working in IJBurg

A housing project comprised of 72 units is located in IJ Burg— a new suburb east from the center of Amsterdam. More specifically, the project sits on a man-made island called Steigereiland North, on a ‘left-over’ green strip of land. Two types of dwellings (A and B) are disseminated around the site forming various permeable blocks of living and...