"Building Middle Class DNA"

ELEMENTAL, CHILE: Building Equity in Cities

“Every time we come here, we have surprises. The Energy is incredible.”

Gonzalo Arteaga of Elemental during a site visit to the Renca Housing Development[1]

Elemental is a group of designers and strategists based in Santiago, Chile that has been implementing open building strategies since 2003. Their efforts have demonstrated how to leverage a small amount of concentrated investment to spark a surge in community development, allowing people to turn ingenuity, cooperation and sweat-equity into a significant financial equity. Since it’s founding, Elemental has completed seven major developments equating to 737 total dwellings, with an additional seven projects either in construction or development adding another 708 dwellings [2]. From the beginning, the working hypothesis was centered around a type of building that would allow for high densities, while simultaneously avoid overcrowding by making extensions and
auto-construction available within the property.

As a case study, we can look at the first major development from Elemental: the Quinta Monroy settlement in Santiago, Chile. The project, commissioned by the Chilean government, was the reorganization of 100 families living in a small informal urban settlement with the condition that the families should participate in the design process. Elemental was given a very limited funds which were expected to buy the land, install the proper urban infrastructure, and construct homes for as many of the families as possible. After examining various housing typologies, including detached housing, town housing, and apartment blocks, it was found that none of these models offered adequate conditions to all residents. (figures 1-3) The final solution was an open matrix of individual units and adjacent territory arranged on each site in a two unit stack. For this scheme, the basic home started as 36 m² but could expand up to 72 m² safely within the existing support structure. (figure 4)

Figure 1: Typology Study- Single Family Detached Housing (Source: Elemental)

Figure 2: Typology Study - Row Housing (Source: Elemental)

Figure 3: Typology Study – Tower Housing (Source: Elemental)

Figure 4: Typology Study – Stacked Matrix (Source: Elemental)

The only way the team was able to provide a successful solution was to distribute the upfront capital equally among all residents, provide only the basic services to each unit, and to activate the residents themselves as a significant contributor to the project.[3] This involvement began in earnest in the design process, with architects working with residents and to develop a vision for the future project, and continues after official construction
commenced, with residents taking the initiative to finish the units themselves. According to Elemental, eighteen months after the first houses were turned over to their owners, more than half had been expanded to beyond 50 m² from the original 36 m². Surprisingly, they also witnessed a change in the culture of auto-construction: while some residents had improved their units using sweat equity, many families hired contracting professionals and only a quarter employed reused materials.[4] By turning control of the ultimate outcome of the building over to the residents, the project also generates a palpable amount of enthusiasm. In other Elemental projects, residents took the principles of auto-construction beyond their private territory and began making improvements to the shared community spaces.[5] Formally, the built-out projects represent an incredibly compelling combination of underlying architectural intention, mingled with the themes developed by the individual inhabitants of the community. (figure 5)

Figure 5: Quinta Monroy Housing - Auto-Construction: before (left) and after (right) (Source: Elemental)

Perhaps the most promising attribute that suggests widespread success of open building methods is a look at the bottom line. No city benefits from the blight of slums, which are notoriously dangerous and hold down land values. On a humanitarian level, society is interested in seeing people lifted out of the cycle of poverty, but cannot afford to build middle class housing for all those living in informal settlements. Open building combined with auto construction has demonstrated that with a minimal investment from centralized funding authority, individuals can contribute to significantly increasing the value of this housing stock. In the case of Quinta Monroy, the government investment in the land, basic infrastructure, and first 50% of the house cost $7,500 USD per unit ($750,000 for the 100 unit complex). According to post-occupancy evaluations the cost to a resident to build-out the second half of their unit was on average $750, bringing the total invested to $8,250. Within two years of construction these same units had a market value of roughly $20,000.[6] The process of building equity through revaluation of the land and transferring that wealth to the families is what Elemental terms building middle-class DNA.

PIVOTAL MOMEN

This is truly a building strategy that addresses the pressing issues that are germane to, but ultimately transcend, the design world. For architects, the question of typology is inseparable from notions of design methodology. Is there a more synthetic way how to characterize the design method currently advocated? What improvements can be made to current approaches? How can we build a stronger relationship between the agencies implementing the urban development of the world’s nest 3 billion people with designers working in the field? How can we better prepare our students and activists to find inroads to this process? How can we support individuals participating in the act of auto-construction or, in other words, how can we create a billion+ armature architect/builders?

In the last fifty years governments and housing authorities have tried addressing the increased need for habitation be building enormous housing projects, often in super dense and notoriously disliked towers. Open building strategies, synthesized with other existing intelligence from the political realm, the sustainability movement, or prefabrication, might suggest that the opposite approach is perhaps more viable; scaling responsibility from the top down and grass-roots involvement from the bottom up might be the most effective way to spark wide-spread progress while giving individual families currently living in informal settlements the opportunity to establish a financial footing.