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

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.

By: Jordi

Jordi — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 23:12:18 +0000

Matt: first of all, let’s not idealize slums. Slum dwellers indeed have a lot of knowledge, but there’s a lot of suffering too, so it is important that something is done about them. Dealing with slums requires a whole lot of expertise, and political will as well. Slums in most cases have problems of all sorts: legal, political, organizational, gender, city-scale development plans, sructurally insecure housing, inadequate water and sanitation infrastructure services, inadequate public transport, unaffordable and unaccessible healthcare and education, environmental hazards, etc. It is reare to find slums dwellers that can sort out theses issues without professional support (including architects). The question is: how this support is planned and carried out; is it respectful, integral, ethical, empowering, etc?

By: GS

GS — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 03:09:40 +0000

i agree with matt “solving problems in the slums have nothing to deal with architecture”

By: J P Bak

J P Bak — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:00:57 +0000

I have with interest studied the often very emotional discussions about the Mumbai project from May 5th 2009 to January 23rd 2010. I am involved in an important housing project in a different part of the world and I wonder, why this extremely important debate suddenly lost everyone’s interest? As things are developing in this world and with the latest financial and environmental disasters one should think that this dialogue could be one of the tools that could keep the momentum in developing the most basic need, shelter for poor and weak against escalating poverty. I would assume that Filipe and Sara’s initiative would be the best platform for such efforts. There is a lot of open questions, what about the stairs in an environment with a lot of handicapped, is just one of them. On a final note I would like to see the modular system in this project expanded with flexible and multipurpose unit