Comments on: Incremental Housing Strategy by Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson

By: Anuj Kumar Soni

Anuj Kumar Soni — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:14:00 +0000

Matt, there is a lack of guidance and proper knowledge of their rights. The question here is not what architect has done, it is how he has brought them together and with help of govt. they got their new houses.

By: Veena

Veena — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 07:23:00 +0000

I agree with you Matt!

By: leperxx

leperxx — Sun, 20 May 2012 17:26:50 +0000

@ matt & others

1. totally disagree with frequent patronising and naive attitude towards "poor undeveloped" countries, and the customization argument through colour is just a joke, if not an offence to people's intelligence.

2. somehow the article is full of pink stereotypes that don't help at all to understand the real and specific situation of these informal urban settlements, nor help the project itself to be analysed in its actual potential value.
it might be that this initiative has some beneficial outcomes to the community from the social and political side, but these are not correctly explained or detailed in the article – don't forget that dezeen is just a trends magazine therefore information tends to be quite superficial and aesthetics-driven (fair enough though, if someone wants deeper info they should dive into other sources).

3. in my opinion this is quite a bad example of architecture, poor and simplistic – as i mentioned above, it may have other values out of the discipline- and a low quality parody of v.b. doshi's aranya complex -you can check it out and judge for yourselves: http://archnet.org/library/files/one-file.jsp?fil…

By: Johan

Johan — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 06:19:24 +0000

I've read some similiar project by Asian Community for Housing Right (ACHR) in Bangkok and Filipina.. as far as I read, it's work!

By: Dom

Dom — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 05:12:30 +0000

I've been reading through this whole thing with a degree of apprehension, and a growing imperative to reply. Apprehension because it became more and more difficult to figure out how to respond, because the need to provide a cogent and complete response seemed to grow in tandem.
I'd hope everyone can agree that the subject of slum life is a complex one; an issue that is as context specific as any. Perhaps on this point, the project in question may have been overoptimistic.
It's very easy to lose sight of the context of a given project online. Reading the article at first I had in mind the kind of shanty made exclusively of found sheets of stock, while it appears the case might resemble a bit more the Favela de Rocinha, already made largely of bricks, mortar, stones, and with solid floors. In terms of a purely structural framework in the specific cases of the dwellings sited in the article, it may be correct that this project's aesthetic value is rather poorer than the vernacular. But the real question, that's only hinted at is the supply of sewage and water and electricity, and where i suspect the majority of the work would have been over the course of the project. You can't just throw pipes at them, and a real expandable solution has to be found. I don't think it's purely informality we're trying to accommodate here, nor is it simply the need for a progresssion to a more sociably productive structure. The trick is to introduce safer structures and services at meagre costs without destroying the potential strength that can be had from what is in situ, without introducing any of those effects we come across all too often in shelter aimed at the poor that diminish one's sense of self worth. What i find all too frequent is a project thinks itself too clever. If you live in a place like that, you feel cheated, and i think that is the most important thing to keep in mind.
By providing a solution that is as bare bones as possible with real differences in program potential perhaps that may just work.