Self-help Housing: Incremental Approaches to Shelter since 1965 traces an intellectual history of “incrementalism,” an approach to the provision of shelter that relies on residents — often low-income populations facing housing insecurity — to help build, adapt, and customize their homes long after any formal design process has concluded. Over the past fifty years, this approach has been adopted in distinct contexts by different disciplines: architecture, international development, and housing policy. Examples of incrementalism in all three fields spring from a single intellectual origin which remains insufficiently examined among contemporary practitioners. 

This research project argues that the lack of a common vocabulary between these three fields has prevented incrementalism from continuing to influence mainstream housing discourse. Uncovering the idea’s origin and tracing its intellectual migration across disciplines requires combining each discipline’s techniques, theories, and assumptions. To investigate the role that architecture culture has played across these three domains in either advancing or limiting the potential of incrementalism, the research analyzes key moments — including competitions, exhibitions, conferences, publications, and pedagogy — that reveal the evolution of how architecture has prioritized or deprioritized issues of housing for people facing housing insecurity.The research investigates how one approach to housing that was first formulated by architects has been adapted into the diverse contexts of vanguard architectural practice, international development strategies of slum upgrading, and local government affordable housing policies

date

September 2021 -

Team

Cassim Shepard

Sergio M. Figueiredo

Bernard Colenbrander