This graduation project explores the circulation of materials, people and knowledge, against the threat of poor and toxic living environments, within the design of Social Housing in the Global South. The project's approach to affordable housing development, which is rooted in the concept of assemblage thinking, revolves around the idea of creating spaces relationally, acknowledging that architecture is always already entangled with histories, stories, desires, places, materials, and lives. It challenges the prevailing trend of segregation and homogeneity by embracing a diverse mix of typologies, fostering inclusivity, and mitigating the rigid binary oppositions that characterize the unsustainable and segregated ways of life in São Paulo. The project is an anti-monoculture manifest that follows the flow of matter and ideas while emphasizing the rejection of homogeneous living environments and encouraging the co-existence of difference, dismantling oppressive dichotomies. ... Read more

Housing project located in Navi Mumbai, India, with a goal of social integration, and a gender-sensitive design approach. The main goal is to create places of loitering for fun and leisure for women of all income groups. ... Read more

The world is increasingly urbanised. Especially in those countries that are in rapid development, the migration to the city is extreme. This is the case for Addis Ababa, the capital city of Ethiopia. Its population growth exceeds the number of newly built housing, and the housing that exists is unfit for a majority of the urban population. People create their own solution and move to informal neighbourhoods: neighbourhoods where they build their own houses and earn their money on the streets.

While the conditions in the informal settlements are far from optimal, people can live their life and create their own opportunities. Somehow, they make a living that they cannot make in formal housing units: either due to the rent they cannot afford to pay, or due to the inability to earn an income in the way they do in the informal neighbourhood. In this way of living the life in the informal neighbourhoods, temporality plays an important role. People are versitale, can adapt to different situations, different circumstances. They can build up a process, starting something from scratch with the resilience to improve it, one step at the time. The streets are vital: pedestrian flows are economic opportunities. Converting any moment, any place into an opportunity that fits the situation the best: from a kitchen to a shop through the window, from a outdoor stall to an outdoor cooking spot, from a place of moving and travelling, to a place for gathering and meeting. Spaces can transform, dwellings can transform, adapt to circumstances, adapt to serve the opportunity that seems most succesful. It is this temporal element that makes them resilient.

But these people are also vulnerable. With the current neighbourhood conditions, a lack of good quality housing, a lack of a well patterned street-network, a lack of services and hygiene, a lack of legal ownership, the dangers are clearly visible: fire, flooding, eviction and disease are potential enemies, created by their living situation. These people, of which there are so many in a city like Addis Ababa, deserve a home that caters their needs, actively engages them to use their abilities to improve their neighbourhood with the right acces to services, streets, economic opportunties. How can we use the theme of temporality to create such dwellings?

In this project, a built environment is envisioned that combines the informal way of living (earning an income, having social relations), with a good quality of dwelling. It provides a framework in which people can built their dwellings tehmselves, keeping them affodable, and being able to constantly adapt the home to what they need most. It generates outside space as well as people flows on lower as well as higher levels to increase the economic opportunities for all of the people living in the area. ... Read more

With almost 110 million inhabitants, Ethiopia is the largest and most populous
country in the Horn of Africa. In the current trend of global urbanization, Ethiopia’s cities are rapidly growing. A tripling of the urban population is to be expected in 2050, putting a big pressure on the housing stock and employment opportunities. Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital is growing at 3.8% per year, as more and more people from smaller villages or rural areas search for a better life standard. Statistics show that among the relatively young migrants, 6 out of 10 is female, coming from different social and cultural backgrounds. Women in Ethiopia, and to a larger extent those living in rural areas, suffer from a lower social status in the patriarchal society. They struggle more to find appropriate housing and supporting networks. This thesis invests the opportunities to create gender sensitive housing to pave the way for these new urban women. Furthermore, it proposes an alternative to the current mass housing strategy. ... Read more

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. ... Read more

Ethiopia alone is one of the most rapidly growing countries not only in the continent of Africa but also in the whole world. The country is populated by almost 110 million inhabitants and only 20% of the whole population is living in the cities. Over 65% of the population from rural areas have started to follow the migration patterns from rural countryside to the urban settlements. The mismanaged urbanization processes create many problems that newcomers and urban poor face. The city of Addis Ababa urgently need a change in creating spaces of transition for migrants, that would sustain their lifestyle, but also offer a flexible way to adapt towards the lifestyle of the city, by providing flexible housing arrangements, where variety of socio-economic groups could dwell together, as the current attempts by the government are failing. Therefore, the project aims to create a model of a co-existing housing scheme between two lifestyle groups of urban dwellers and rural newcomers, as well as different income groups of economically weak income, low-income, middle-income and high-income people. The chosen location serves as prototype of creating a neighbourhood, where different, even conflicting, uses and users can live together and enjoy the convenience of junction. However, this work only if the variety of people are accommodated in an urban framework, that allows them to be good neighbours for each other. ... Read more

Ethiopia is the second most populous country in Africa but only 20% of its population lives in urban areas. The relevance of this fact entails that traditions, economic activities and their social structure are still highly attached to the rural, which is reflected in the ‘’ruralization’’ of the urban areas, that have retarded the progress of cities according to the goals set by the government to achieve modernization. In The capital, Addis Ababa, traditional practices rooted in the countryside are part of the daily activities fostering a juxtaposition and fragmentation of land uses emphasizing the proliferation of informal economies and the unforeseen urban growth where lower and higher-income groups live side by side. In that sense, I find in these challenges an opportunity to propose an inclusive scenario enabling adaptations over time, while pretending to dignify the lives of the current residents and newcomers by granting the same accessibility to decent homes and healthy environments through the sense of appropriation for their own living environment. ... Read more

Ethiopia is forecast to be the fastest growing economy in Sub-Saharan Africa. Partly due to this economic growth, the urban population is expected to increase significantly in the coming decades. In the group of urban migrants, more than half comes from rural areas, indicating a large sum of poorly educated, low skilled workers as major part of the migrant group. The main reasons to migrate to urban areas is the increased job opportunities and education. These influxes of low skilled workers to the urban areas intensify the informal sector in cities like the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa. This informal sector comprises those working in informal business, as well as a huge group of domestic workers, apprentices and unpaid family workers. Being able to participate in productive commercial activity is the first step to alleviate oneself from poverty. The problem is that the formal, governmental institutions reject the idea of informality in areas where government is in managerial position. Informal economies are banished from government-controlled housing areas. This is out of fear for the unbound nature of informality, while the formal intuitions main drive is to control everything. The lack of informality, be it informal housing or informal economy, creates order, stability and the ease for the government to exert oversight. However, this lack of informality would also create a vacuum of opportunities to make a living for people, as the informal ways of generating income would also be the only way of generating income for people lacking education and skills. The goal should therefore be to incorporate the informal lifestyle and usage of the low-income households into the formal planning so the informal is not only seen as a problem anymore but as a part of the solution. Through this project I hope to show the possibility that formal and informal is not just two ways of life that stand in contrast with each other, but that it can coexist and, in which low income people can make a better living for themselves. ... Read more

The effects of India’s shift towards economic liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation in the mid 1990’s has drastically altered the landscape of its cities. These powerful forces have imposed further spatial disjuncture on an unplanned city. More specifically, forces of contemporary urbanisation plague the developing fabric of Mumbai’s urban periphery. Nala Sopara lacks an adaptive, secure and inclusive physical identity, which is situated in, and modeled off the existing needs and practices of its locality. The colonisation of the area by newly established ‘handshake chawls’ has become a dominant condition which disrupts and destroys existing domestic practices and patterns of habitation. The transformative typological variation and morphological potential of typology present in Mumbai, from the city’s first settlement to present day developments, makes the impact of typology on domestic life clear. This process of typological renewal, termed typology genealogy by Atelier Bow Wow, questions what the various typological shifts or variations afford or disallow their inhabitants. This project aligns with their thinking, which poses the role of the architect as one who observes and applies the efficiencies of user appropriation in the creation of new typologies.
The prevailing response to rising density requirements in this area lacks severely in social sustainability. In combining ethnographic research with a typological approach, the project seeks to primarily address three core themes: [1] flexibility and growth; [2] the urban public/private space spectrum; [3] open space hierarchies. These three inter-related motives work towards creating an urban domestic fabric which is informed by and empowers endemic habitation practices. ... Read more

In Mumbai, “two-thirds of the city’s (Bombay) residents are crowded
into just 5 percent of the total area, while the richer or more rent-protected one-third monopolize the remaining 95 percent.” The Development Plans for Mumbai, criticized as “a form of ‘planned’ exclusion of the poor and the middle class”, have failed to address issues of slums and affordable housing. These acts of exclusions form pockets of ghettoization, which are breeding grounds of social tension, insecurity, violence, and psychological disorders, where people are denied access to water supply, security, education, job opportunities, and connection to the city.This “conspicuous separation” between “gated communities of the privileged and ghettoized territories of the marginalized people”, as stated by PK Das , not only creates harsh boundaries among different groups, but also unfairness in terms of accessibility to open spaces. In short, the widening of income gap leads to spatial inequality in Mumbai and Nalasopara contributes to the unfairness in accessibility to open space, harsh separation across income groups, ghettoization of marginalized groups, and the lack of decision-making power among people, which all together denies people to
The Right to the City, i.e. (1) the right to appropriate urban space; (2) the
right to participate centrally in the production of urban space; and (3) the
right to diversity, as proposed by Henri Lefebvre and summarized by
Purcell and Duke. The project therefore aims to create accessible and meaningful urban spaces, soften boundaries among income groups while having appropriate
borders, provide opportunities for people participation in the development process, accommodate and encourage diversity, and combat segregation that has kept inhabitants from appropriation and participation, which all together bring The Right to the City to the people. Using Sriprastha, an existing deteriorating cooperative housing in the West of Nalasopara
as a starting point, I would propose three new housing typologies that cater aspirations of different income groups, while being relatable to the existing buildings. These typologies would be offered to the existing residents as choices to redevelop their existing societies on a case by case basis. To show how these new typologies would be applicable in other areas, they would also be built from scratch on a neighboring empty plot, with a different configuration from the existing urban fabric. Ideas of participatory design, levels of intervention and control, mixed income housing, and cross subsidization would be explored. Ultimately, the project hopes to propose an alternative scenario from the current situation of complete exclusion of the urban poor, creating borders that act as “zones of exchanges”, rather than harsh boundaries. ... Read more

As many other parts of the global south, the built environment of Kullu, an Himalayan valley of Himachal Pradesh (india), will be probably threaten by several types of natural hazards, mainly caused by climate change.
This fact, together with the phenomenon of migration towards the main urban environments, determines a risky and urgent situation that needs solutions to encourage a safe future development.
A research on the local vernacular architecture led to discover which are the archetypical qualities that the existing typologies embody, especially in terms of sustainability.
The main hypothesis is that several contemporary issues regarding the mitigation and the adaptation of the built environment to the effect of climate change could be solved finding the meaning of innovation in the inspiration given from ancient concepts.
Such study - carried on mainly by field researches and existing literatures – allowed the designer to gain the basic knowledge on the architectural practices of the area and therefore to be able to elaborate a project that can re-interpret and combine the local cultural specificities with his more global knowledge.
The research conclusions are demonstrated in a new design for the school building of the Dagpo Monastery, a Tibetan cultural center placed in Kais, a small village in the middle of the valley.
The aim is to solve the problem of availability of construction materials, building comfort, durability of structure and sustainability - but also to exemplify how the spontaneous architecture-without-architects can really inspire architects during their creative process. ... Read more

Exhibition 5 - 26 March 2018, Faculty of Architecture (Delft University of Technology), Corridor ... Read more

Co-curators of the Exhibition "Housing for the Global South", at the International Social Housing Festival, held from 13 June to 21 June 2017 at Het Schip Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands ... Read more