AFFORDABILITY . SUSTAINABILITY . PLANNING . DESIGN
THE [+] AND [-] OF HOUSING
There’s no doubt that collective housing is a particular problem of architecture. However - as we know it today - it is, to a great extent, a condition of the modern city. The significant population growth in contemporary societies compels us to be aware of how we live, inhabit, and think about the city. For some, the tapestry composed of single-family homes in the cities’ surrounding suburbs and satellites continues to be the mandatory model in order to meet population growth, understood as a vulgar accumulation, while being a panacea for the deep sense of individuality generated by a consumer society. Others have chosen high density and the re-population of urban areas as a mechanism to ratify massive real estate construction, which in certain cases has become the natural growth model and a displacement strategy aimed at making room for the new bourgeois, and in others, the aspiration of a middle class that lives to pay for its housing. All the same, neither of these housing models has been a solution to dealing with the peculiar conditions of a place and culture, nor has it provided or fostered collective, tolerant, and inclusive models, in virtue of hybrid models that are affordable to the middle class, which doesn’t receive any housing subsidies – as is the case with social housing – and doesn’t have the capacity, at least financially, to gentrify its housing.
The horizontal spreading model has revealed the failure of a collective coexistence model and high density doesn’t seem to solve crowding issues. Therefore, it’s necessary to identify not only the critical mass to be served, but also the intrinsic problems of collective housing: density, repetition, difference, privacy, generator cell, flexibility, market, and culture, among others. The fact is that collective housing switches back and forth between two scales which are very far apart: the human scale (which makes up society) and the urban scale (which makes up the city). Society + City = the critical mass to which housing is aimed at. But nowadays, who makes up society? Who makes up the city? How is our housing critical mass constituted?
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International Federation for Housing and Planning, Invited Speaker on the Young Architect's Perspectives for Housing on the 52nd Congress held at San Juan, Puerto Rico, October 2008.
