Housing without Debt
It is now more or less universally accepted that there is something fundamentally wrong with our housing economy. Not just the centralised industrial production models we use to produce housing: our dependence on a few large development companies to buy the land, beat their way through local community resistance, and build rows of poor quality, unsustainable mass-housing that fewer and fewer of us can afford. The Big Short is not about those industrial housing models. It’s about the economy behind them.
Alejandro Aravena explains his approach to social housing
In the this extract from 2011 documentary Urbanized, Pritzker Prize winner Alejandro Aravena explains his approach to social housing with his architecture "do tank" Elemental.
De Drager - A Film about Architect John Habraken
Dutch architect, theorist and professor John Habraken (*1928) is one of the most controversial architects of his generation. Whereas some people revere him as a guru, others denounce him as a technocrat. In order to begin to grasp this person, who according to friends as well as foes has had «one good idea in his life», the film invites the viewer on a discovery-journey through Habraken’s body of thoughts. In conversation with Habraken, his friends and other people who have observed him from a distance the bits and pieces add up to a whole. In the end not only does the viewer encounter the various levels of Habraken and his «one idea», but also a fundamental redefinition of the role of the architect is revealed.
“The federation model of community organizing” – Sheela Patel, Slum Dwellers International – UN-Habitat
In the past two decades through a process called “Enumeration” through which the members collect at city level data about slums, Slum Dwellers International have created a mechanism which serves to create a city wide network of urban informal settlements with the intention of the dwellers to see themselves as part of a larger subsection of the city, whose needs have been neglected and whose voice has to reach the city and the national government.