Purpose
The global housing shortage, intensified by climate change, poses unique challenges for low-income populations, particularly in regions highly vulnerable to environmental hazards, such as the Caribbean. This study investigates housing in Saint Martin, where communities face severe housing shortages and increased exposure to climate-related threats, such as Hurricane Irma in 2017. With limited external support, many residents have adopted self-building strategies, constructing and incrementally modifying their homes to withstand local environmental risks and accommodate changing needs.

Design/methodology/approach
This research, conducted through ethnographic observations and semi-structured interviews with 30 residents, explores how low- and middle-income households built and adapted their homes over time, focusing on the construction process, materials, forms and aspects of safety, comfort and beauty. It follows the narratives of six housing units that exemplify a proposed housing typology and documents residents’ efforts to enhance durability, functionality and aesthetics under challenging circumstances.

Findings
The findings highlight that self-organized housing practices in Saint Martin are shaped by financial constraints, climate risks and evolving household needs. Residents use incremental construction, climate-responsive design elements, materials perceived as durable and community-based support to adapt their homes.

Originality/value
Documented housing practices reflect both resilience and cultural expression, emphasizing the need for community-inclusive, safe, flexible and climate-adapted housing design approaches. Additionally, by analyzing these adaptive strategies, the study offers insights for the Designing for Flow Framework, promoting housing solutions that align with local contexts and contribute to sustainable development in hazard-prone areas like the Caribbean.

The urgency of addressing housing challenges in low-income areas is increasing due to widening socio-economic inequalities and the worsening impact of natural disasters. Saint Martin, a small Caribbean island, is struggling to provide affordable housing amidst hurricanes, floods, and heat waves. As a result, there has been a rise in self-organized housing units, which are built incrementally and are susceptible to risks. The main challenge is to balance durability, functionality, and esthetic appeal over time. Inspired by St. Martin’s self-organized units, this article explores housing considerations in low-income, hazard-prone contexts by emphasizing their temporalities. Integrating insights from a formative study, including a literature review and ethnographic research, the paper draws on Stewart Brand’s “Layers of Change” and the concept of “Flow”. The study identifies layers within self-organized units corresponding to durability, functionality, and esthetic appeal. It delves into their connection with building activities over time, unveiling the temporalities of housing considerations. This exploration leads to the proposition of “Designing for a Flow” as a novel design approach. Offering practical insights within a concise framework, the study provides nuanced perspectives on mitigating housing challenges in low-income and hazard-prone contexts.

The South African Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) was initiated to provide subsidised housing for low‐income families. However, the programme faced challenges in establishing adequate technical guidelines and standards, resulting in subpar housing quality. This article discusses the multifaceted nature of subsidised housing design, emphasising the importance of incorporating technical housing standards as well as the spatial needs of residents based on their context (at both domestic and neighbourhood scales). The article focuses on the K206 housing RDP project in Alexandra, Johannesburg, as a case study that transitioned from generic technical standards to a resident‐responsive design scheme that was inspired by the backyard room incremental expansions that were already prevalent in the Alexandra context. A critical review of South Africa’s RDP housing design technical standards and policy is explored. The article also examines the density standards and allowances for incremental expansions introduced by the K206 project, analysing data derived from fieldwork observations, interviews, and the spatial analysis of 26 dwelling units. The study’s findings underscore the significance of maintaining an equilibrium between technical standards and resident‐responsive design decisions. The results demonstrate that tailoring the RDP housing design solutions to unique contextual needs can significantly elevate the quality of life of residents concerning income generation and flexibility for incremental expansion. However, this balance is delicate and disparities between the RDP technical standards and user‐initiated development over time also have the potential to ultimately impair residents’ living spaces.

In two successive editions (Spring 2022 and Spring 2023), 81 students from TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment participated in the Architectural Ethnography course. They conducted micro-ethnographic studies in collaboration with Leiden University Medical Centre students, under the supervision of a team from TU Delft, LUMC, Hogeschool Leiden and the Thesis Hub the Hague Southwest. The students thoroughly examined residential areas in three districts: Bouwlust en Vrederust, Moerwijk, and Ypenburg. Their data collection methods included informal conversations, sketches, photographic surveys, observations, video diaries, and mental mapping. The focus was on understanding how urban and housing design influences interactions among humans, non-humans, and the diverse environmental elements. The exhibition “At Home in The Hague” showcases diverse research outputs, such as analytic posters, graphic novels, collages, and stop motion movies, among others. These are complemented by a short documentary compiling excerpts from video diaries recorded by the residents. This collaborative exhibition involves educators, researchers, students, and residents of the case study areas. Its varied materials pay homage to the multitude of personal and group narratives in the city, going beyond stereotypical portrayals of urban life in the vibrant communities of Ypenburg and The Hague Southwest.

Searching for the ideal density of households in residential areas has been a persistent pursuit of planners, designers, and policymakers since the inception of the rapid urbanization process triggered by the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century. One of the main challenges in this goal has been achieving the optimal trade-off between economic efficiency and quality of life, avoiding urban conditions prone to trigger social unrest and environmental degradation. [...]

State-subsidised housing in the Global South often receives criticism for ­failing to meet the economic needs of low-income citizens. The K206 housing project, situated in Alexandra, Johannesburg, stands out as a unique case by not only addressing housing requirements but also addressing the economic concerns of its low-income homeowners. This response included the incorporation of state initiated formal built-in rental rooms and provisions for incremental extensions to support income generation. This paper aims to explore both of these options that allowed residents to use housing as a means of income generation, and examines household strategies and the motivations behind using these options for extra income. Twenty-one resident interviews and spatial analyses provided insights on how the K206 housing facilitated income-­generating opportunities for its residents and analyses whether households capitalised on these opportunities and the factors influencing their decisions to do so. The findings were that state built-in backyard rooms did not generally work for income generation due to poor allocation strategies that caused conflict. Incremental extensions, even in unintended locations proved more effective for generating income. Incrementally added backyard rooms served multiple purposes and had the potential to generate income to address cash shortfalls, contribute to ­pension plans, and facilitate investments.

Soon after India’s independence in 1947, Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, commissioned Le Corbusier with the plan for the new capital of Punjab, Chandigarh. While Le Corbusier and his team were building Chandigarh largely based on the principles of CIAM’s Athens Charter, the CIAM met in Dubrovnik, in 1956, with the aim to draft a Charte de l’Habitat. But while no such charter was ever formally drawn up, over the next two decades, discourse on ‘habitat’ would come to be dominated by members of Team 10 and their largely Euro-American affiliates. However, this paper argues that the most significant typological innovations in housing design in the second half of the last century are to be found outside the conventional canon of Euro-American circles. In fact, it was the Habitat Bill of Rights, a manifesto commissioned in 1976 by the Iranian government to an ad-hoc group of architects including Josep Luis Sert, George Candilis, Nader Ardalan, Moshe Safdie and Balkrishna Doshi, that proved to play a pivotal role in shaping post-colonial typological innovations in housing design that would take the notions of temporality, community, and patterns of human inhabitation as key factors in the design process. To illustrate the impact of the Habitat Bill of Rights, this paper will unpack the Aranya Township project, a ‘sites-and-services’ scheme prepared by Doshi in the mid-1980s in Indore in India that drew many of its design principles from the influential 1976 document. Using data collected on-site and graphic documentation of the settlement’s transformation through time, from the late 1980s until its current state, this paper will demonstrate how Aranya promotes incremental growth as a determining factor to reconcile some of the key objectives of modern urbanism (improving sanitation and mechanical efficiency) while acknowledging and accommodating vernacular patterns of inhabitation and community.

Este artículo profundiza en el debate actual sobre las interconexiones entre el proyecto de vivienda y el hábitat, destacando cómo los momentos de crisis impulsan la innovación, a menudo mostrada en exposiciones de vivienda. El artículo propone tres enfoques clave para el proyecto participativo de vivienda: Incrementalidad (con la adaptación al crecimiento y el cambio), Diversidad Tipológica (con la adaptación a diversos patrones de habitabilidad) y Agrupación (con el sentido de pertenencia a la comunidad). Estos enfoques de proyecto reconocen la vivienda como un proceso dinámico y enfatizan la importancia de dar prioridad a la acción humana y la inclusión, evitando la mercantilización de los hábitats humanos. El artículo destaca la importancia de la colaboración transdisciplinar en la toma de decisiones sobre el proyecto de vivienda, reconociendo la importancia de una variedad de factores vitales para promover comunidades urbanas resilientes e inclusivas. Concluye abogando por la educación y la investigación arquitectónicas centradas en la temporalidad como una dimensión crucial en el proyecto de vivienda, esencial para abordar los desafíos cambiantes y dar forma a futuros urbanos sostenibles.

This article delves into the ongoing debate on the interconnections between housing design and habitat, highlighting how moments of crises drive innovation, often showcased in housing exhibitions. The article proposes three key design approaches for participatory housing design: Incrementality (accommodating growth and change), Typology Mix (accommodating diverse patterns of inhabitation), and Clustering (creating meaningful communities). These design approaches acknowledge housing as a dynamic process and emphasize the importance of giving priority to human agency and inclusiveness, overturning the commodification of human habitats. The article highlights the significance of transdisciplinary collaboration in housing design decision-making, acknowledging the importance of an array of factors that are vital to promote resilient and inclusive urban communities. The article concludes by advocating for architectural education and research to focus on temporality as a crucial dimension in housing design, essential for tackling evolving challenges and shaping sustainable urban futures.

The digital turn in architecture seems to have displaced the house as a paradigm for architectural theory. Omitting the house, and with it, housing and dwelling as key sites for the reconstitution of the discipline, recent theorisations of the digital in architecture have almost exclusively focused on new methods of production and notions of materiality alongside profound changes to the urban and social dimensions of the built environment. The Covid-19 pandemic has unveiled the multifaceted dimensions of the impact of the new digital technologies on dwelling as private houses transformed into online workspaces. It calls for a reflection on the question of dwelling as formulated by Martin Heidegger in 1951, when he suggested that answers won’t be found in technology and quantitative approaches to the pressing housing urgency of the time, but rather in a rethinking of culture through existentialist philosophy. The question of dwelling after the digital turn leads to scrutiny of the history of the digitisation of the house and the shifting nature of domesticity, and to an exploration of involved motivations and values, oscillating between a techno-utopianism to a techno-capitalism. While the boundaries between real and virtual realms are blurred, the house and dwelling find a reconceptualisation in ecological and relational terms, thereby dissolving the house as a discrete object or entity. Privacy, autonomy, and physicality are in need of a rebalancing.

Earthen construction is re-gaining popularity as an ecological and economical alternative to contemporary building materials. While building with earth offers several benefits, its performance due to water ingress is a concern for its widespread application. This limitation is often solved by adding chemical stabilisers such as Portland cement and hydraulic lime. Chemical stabilisers are a subject of widespread debate as they increase the cost and embodied energy of the structure, and reduce the desirable characteristics of raw or unstabilised earth. This along with perceived environmental performance, renewability, and proven effectiveness in traditional earthen construction has led to a growing interest in biological or organic stabilisers. Although the strengthening mechanism of biological stabilisers is widely covered in scientific studies, discussion regarding the water-resistance is limited. This review aggregates the research from the field of earthen construction and geotechnical engineering and extends it to explain the possible mechanism responsible for the water-resistance behaviour of biologically stabilised earthen materials. This study includes a wide range of traditional and industrial biological stabilisers derived from animals (cow-dung, casein, chitosan), plants (starch, guar gum, cactus mucilage, lignin, tannin) seaweeds (alginate, agar, carrageen) and microbes (xanthan gum, gellan gum). A conceptual model of water-ingress in unstabilised earthen blocks is proposed and the response of biological stabiliser to water ingress and related physico-chemical and physical factors is discussed using the model at microscale (stabiliser interaction with clay, sand) and macroscale (hydraulic conductivity of block). Properties of stabilisers such as hydrophobicity, stability under wet conditions or interaction with cations have a dominant effect on the overall response to water ingress. Key gaps have been identified in the existing knowledge that are necessary to investigate in order to understand the water-resistance behaviour comprehensively. The study concludes with a brief assessment of biological stabilisers based on their performance and feasibility to use in contemporary earthen construction.

Brazilian anthropologist Teresa Caldeira describes peripheral urbanization as a bottom-up way of producing cities that is pervasive in the Global South. Using peripheral urbanization as a theoretical framework, this chapter analyzes the results of three housing design studios, organized by the group Architecture & Dwelling at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands), developed in collaboration with partners in India, Bangladesh and Ethiopia. The pedagogic strategies of the Global Housing design studios are focused on exploring the design decision-making process as a locus to address the different temporalities of the architectural project and negotiate cultural differences. This pedagogical strategy offers a contribution to decolonize the curriculum of architectural education in the Global South, exploring critically the interplay between accommodating indigenous knowledges and tackling the challenges of planetary urbanization.

This video will present a very short history of the sites-and-services approach, one of the most popular strategies for the development of incremental housing implemented over the last half-century. We will explore this approach from the perspective of spatial design, and use two case studies (Nefas Silk, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia and Charkop, Mumbai, India) to unpack some of the key design and managerial considerations one must take into account while planning for sustainable and affordable housing.

The water-resistance of cow-dung has made it a widely used stabiliser in traditional earthen structures in several Asian and African countries. Multiple studies have shown an improvement in water-resistance with the addition of cow-dung, but none provides insight into this behaviour. The present study investigates the water-resistance behaviour of cow-dung stabilised earthen blocks through an extensive experimental programme to identify and characterise the components of cow-dung responsible for its water-resistance. Fresh cow-dung was collected and separated into fibres (>63 μm), medium-sized microbial aggregates (1-63 μm) and small-sized microbial aggregates (0.5-7 μm). Each component was mixed with soil and samples were prepared at different water contents (optimum water content corresponding to the highest dry density and water content higher than optimum) and compacted with 2.5 MPa force to prepare compressed blocks. The water-resistance of these blocks was evaluated through the immersion and modified drip/rain test. It was found that the small-sized microbial aggregates are almost entirely responsible for water-resistance behaviour of cow-dung stabilised earthen blocks. Small-sized microbial aggregates were further characterised by gas chromatography, mercury intrusion porosimetry, N2- BET surface area, zeta potential measurement and electron microscopy. The results indicate that the small-sized microbial aggregates are composed of clay-sized negatively charged particles that are rich in fatty acids. The hydrophobicity of these particles is hypothesised to be responsible for water-resistance behaviour. These insights are further used to produce stabilised blocks that performed at least 30 times better than the unstabilised blocks in both water-resistance tests. The study concludes with practical recommendations for the use of wet cow-dung over dry cow-dung and a reduction of fibre content to increase the water-resistance of earthen blocks.

Architectuurstudenten hebben gekeken naar de gedragsen bewegingspatronen van bewoners in de gebouwde omgeving in Bouwlust en Vrederust. De tentoonstelling presenteert op meerdere manieren de diverse ervaringen van haar bewoners in relatie tot de straat, de huizen en het dagelijks leven. Tentoonstelling in Bibliotheek Bouwlust, Den Haag, 28 september - 10 november 2022.

The BK faculty will be represented at the 17th Venice International Architecture Exhibition with “Housing the Urban Invisibles”. A show that displays student work and educational material that critically explores alternative approaches for the design of mass housing as a key component of sustainable development.

This show addresses the theme of the Biennale, “How Will We Live Together?”, and invites the visitors to re-think the current systems for the production of affordable housing worldwide, with a particular focus on contexts undergoing a process of rapid urban growth.

“Housing the Urban Invisibles” draws upon the results of the Dhaka studio co-organised by Prof. Marina Tabassum during her Visiting Professorship at the faculty in the Spring of 2019, expanded with photos and student work developed under the auspices of the Global Housing educational programme for Tema (Ghana), Mumbai (India) and Addis Ababa (Ethiopia). The students work from the Global Housing studios is complemented with a display of educational material developed for the edX MOOC “Global Housing Design”, developed by the Global Housing research group.

Some of the most outstanding architectural monuments were designed for, or inspired by funerary rituals and practices. The pyramids of Egypt, the Taj Mahal in India, and the Mayan pyramids in the Yucatan peninsula in Mexico are but a few notable examples. These and many other architectural wonders have survived the passing of time; they are timeless. It is somewhat paradoxical, however, that timelessness is a quality so often attached to buildings that are intrinsically attached to death. In his The Timeless Way of Building, Christopher Alexander discusses processes of making buildings that can come alive, and survive the passing of time. For Alexander, the timeless way of building is a “process which allows the life inside a person, or a family, or a town, to flourish, openly, in freedom, so vividly that it gives birth, of its own accord, to the natural order which is needed to sustain this life”. […]

The Bologna declaration states that, “successful learning and studying in higher education should involve students in deep learning”. However, a survey of faculty across institutes in Nepal and Bhutan highlights that the undergraduate students in engineering and management lack skills needed to be industry-ready. They face difficulty in getting employed after graduation and if placed, then struggle during their employment due to insufficient practical experience, lack of good communication skills and unawareness of broader socio-economic contexts. The Erasmus + funded project, “Strengthening Problem-based learning in South Asian Universities” (PBL South Asia) is an endeavour to address these pressing concerns in education quality, employability and overall sustainable development of the region and to imbibe deep learning capabilities. Therefore, as an empirical study to clarify and in turn, inculcate PBL in South Asian undergraduate education, the young faculty of the inexperienced institutes from Nepal and Bhutan, alongside the students from the experienced institutes from India and Europe, were mentored by faculty and researchers from the latter to undertake multidisciplinary case studies. The strategy of “design thinking” was employed to methodologically guide the cases and keep it consistently problem-based, i.e. the learning is driven by the problem with no one correct solution. Results showed that the participants reflected improvement in problem-solving skills and increased motivation, apart from enhanced collaboration and improved communication ability. Based on these findings, further development of curricula to imbibe PBL in its existing courses and guidelines to train the trainers for implementation of the same, are currently in progress.

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 society at large, an of urban communities in particular. During the cold-war period, this phenomenon was particularly striking. Addis Ababa is a case in point. In this article, we review three cases of housing settlements built in Addis Ababa from the mid1960s to the early 1990s, which were developed under the auspices of the foreign aid agenda. Spanning two completely different political systems, from the last decade of the rule of emperor Haileselassie I to the whole duration of the Derg regime, this article discusses the complex balance between individual homeownership and collective welfare as central aspects of housing programs and housing design that aimed at emancipating communities of urban poor in Addis Ababa.

Building adequate housing is a pressing issue worldwide. With close to a billion people currently living in slums, accommodating a growing population, and improving dwelling conditions is a critical issue for society. This challenge cannot be solved with a one-size-fits-all approach. Every city, region and country demand their own housing models and prototypes. That’s why housing design needs to negotiate many aspects simultaneously to achieve sustainable urban environments and inclusive dwelling communities. This course uncovers how social, economic and environmental factors are interrelated in the design of housing settlements. For this, the course dives into three key aspects that anyone involved in housing design should take into consideration: time, environment, and community. Each of these aspects will be examined through a specific design approach, respectively Incrementality, Typology Mix, and Clustering.