Incremental Housing Strategy
In 2007, we were invited by Jockin Arputham, President of Slum Dwellers International, to come to India to develop new housing solutions for the urban poor. Jockin was deeply impressed with our work building a school and social center in the favela of Rocinha in Brazil, together with the local community. The pilot project was in Yerawada, Pune.
For 7 months we spent every day on site in Yerawada, eating with people, drinking chai with them and finding out about their lives. We discovered that although Yerawada is very poor, it also has a rich sense of community and local people didn’t want to move to a social housing block and didn’t want to lose their homes.
Our solution was to create a strategy of incremental improvement, focusing on those dwellings that were most in need. Instead of demolishing and rebuilding, we wanted to allow districts to improve organically without uprooting communities.
We developed three basic prototypes homes, all with a 270sq ft area but with different configurations. Local people were able to choose the configuration that best suited their needs and the community was also asked to engage with the construction process and encouraged to customise each house.
This real urban fabric – organic and home-made – can be far more interesting than over designed neighbourhoods and it is also often more community based. Narrow streets, close neighbours and plenty of communal spaces mean that Yerawada inhabitants are much less likely to experience loneliness and isolation than their wealthier counterparts in countries like Sweden.
1000 houses were built in the pilot project, 5000 houses were built in total. Although our urban strategy was followed, most of the houses were built by the local people themselves. Like Savita Sonawane says – “it’s slum dweller design”.
Credits: Filipe Balestra, Sara Göransson with Guilherme de Bivar, Martinho Pitta, Rafael Balestra, Remy Turquin, Carolina Cantante
We would like to extend our gratitude to:
Jockin Arputham and his network: Sheela Patel, Jon Rainbow, Maria Lobo, Katia Savchuk from the Non-Governmental Organization SPARC, and Savita Sonawane, Jyoti Bhende, Gulshan Shaikh, Lata Ghodke, Jyoti Dalvi, Dhananjay Sadlapure, Nermada Vetale, Sheela Tambe, Manda Hadwale, Padma Gore, Chaya Gaikwad and Shobha Adhav from Community Based Organization Mahila Milan, as well as to Praveen Pardeshi and Avinash Salve, at Pune Municipal Corporation (PMC), Sharad Mahajan from Non-Governmental Organization MASHAL and the wonderful people of Yerawada and Netaji Nagar.
