GlobalVillages
Nikos Salingaros /
Social Housing

 
Date: Thu, 27 May 2006

From: NikosSalingaros

Dear Andrius;

Here is an outline that sets up some questions for ''the future of social housing''. I have been asked to prepare a comprehensive report for Brazil (applicable to all of Latin America), to be presented in November. For this reason, I would like to have input and help from the Global Villages Group. I have also asked my friend, the New Urbanist Michael Mehaffy, to possibly come in on this project. Michael is directly involved with the reconstruction after the Katrina devastation in the Southern US, which faces similar, but not identical, realities.

Here is the chance for us to solve the social housing problem which is a major component of world urban growth. Surely we can do it. I thought that perhaps a substantial solution would be better for history than a short essay by me. And supposedly, we are the world experts, and can draw upon Christopher Alexander's work and all the other stuff lying around unapplied. Governments instead impose the most crazy antihuman schemes that generate pestilential housing for the poor. ''We can take this simple problem and make it a world solution, announcing it as such to other interested parties and governments.''


OVERVIEW

Patterns of Social Housing

1. Existing public housing projects are conceptualized and built as cheap dormitories, and thus follow a military planning philosophy. We should abandon this mindset and build urban villages instead.

2. A village represents a complex social network, with the appropriate urban morphology of a network. It is not monofunctional, and it is not homogeneous. It cannot be built in a top-down fashion by central government.

3. Governments are still stuck in the mindset of social housing serving jobs in a particular place. The reality is that villages connect into an urban conglomeration, where people work wherever they can find jobs.

Connectivity and Spirituality

1. People become psychologically sick and hostile in an environment devoid of nature. Biophilia is innate in our genes. Villages need to blend with and not replace natural habitats.

2. We connect to plants through their geometrical structure, thus some geometries are more connective to the human spirit than others. We feel comfortable with a built environment that incorporates '''complex natural geometry'''.

3. Residents should love their homes and neighborhoods. That means that the form of the immediate built environment must be spiritual and not industrial.

4. Industrial materials and typologies generate hatred for the built environment. We grow hostile to surfaces and forms that do not nourish us spiritually, because we feel their rejection of our humanity.

5. The sacred character of traditional villages cannot be dismissed as outmoded nonsense (as is done nowadays). This is the only thing that connects a village on the large scale to people, hence indirectly to each other. We need to build it into the village.

Construction Strategy

1. Use pattern languages to plan the transportation network long before any building takes place. This is essential for generating village and neighborhood centers. Rigid grids favored by central government ruin the internal connectivity of the village.

2. Use pattern languages (and develop new ones appropriate to the locality) to construct a village for a complex society consisting of children, adults, seniors; and including housing, stores, retail, schools, informal spaces, transportation hubs, etc.

3. Existing anti-complex (i.e., antihuman) monofunctional zoning must be rescinded by central government. Without that step, all schemes preclude urban life from the beginning, regardless of what they might look like.

4. Encourage construction systems (controlled from the top down) to work with local future residents (working from the bottom up) so as to generate low-cost, higher-quality dwellings.

5. Use pattern languages to rehabilitate existing low-income owner-occupied houses, and to convert current rental units to owner-occupied. This requires an infusion of money, but it also generates construction work.

Funding Strategy

1. Funding sources now determine social housing morphology. Central government wants to build in the most efficient manner. That cannot generate a village. We need to identify all available sources of funding, to break out of this antipattern.

2. Raise funds from various sources in order to ensure that homes are affordable to neighborhood residents. A private-public partnership is the most effective way of using the market economy to generate a village instead of a monolithic monster favored by government bureaucracy.

3. Involvement with non-governmental associations will keep the heavy hand of central government from sabotaging the use of pattern languages in building a village, or in converting an existing dysfunctional project into a village.

Maintenance Strategy

1. Encourage and support tenants to maintain their dwellings. The traditional subsidized rental solution has been disastrous. ''It is not possible for a tenant to value a material structure owned by someone else'', especially when the owner is the resented central government.

2. Make it possible to own an affordable home, even if it is the most primitive type of dwelling. Encourage government financial underwriting, seen as a sound future investment that prevents social housing being destroyed by its tenants.

3. Establish a strict legislated code of responsibility for the residents. Owners can be held accountable for maintaining their environment, whereas renters cannot. Since supply can never meet demand, owners can be made to care for their dwellings.


I look forward to hearing from all of you,

Cheers,

Nikos

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