Description

This project description is an excerpt from the longer article “Housing Special Populations”. For a comparative analysis and further data on this and all other categories including accompanying graphs, please see the article “A Turning Point”.

Two projects in distinct contexts addressing low-cost housing and housing for a diverse community are Quinta Monroy and Miss Sargfabrik, enjoined by their respective achievements as exceptional experimental prototypes. The former is located in Iquique, the capital of north Chile, which was formerly a part of Peru until 1879. Bordered by the South Pacific Ocean on the west and the Andes mountain range to the east, the city’s early development was due in large part to the discovery of metals such as silver and copper, and more importantly, of the nitrates in the Atacama Desert that fueled its boom as a settlement. In 1975, Iquique reinvented itself as a fishing port, and later created the ZOFRI – the Zona Franca or the Duty Free Zone to promote foreign trade in copper mining, tourism, and fishing. Since then, the population grew from 73,000 to nearly 200,000 in 2000, shrinking slightly to 186,000 in 2012.[1] This zone was developed in the context of the authoritarian political regime that lasted from 1973-1990, and by the time democracy was reclaimed, the country as a whole had a deficit of nearly 1 million affordable housing units. Given that Chile’s population at that time was around 14 million people, the deficit implied that close to 20 percent of the country’s population was residing in shanty towns, deteriorated housing, or overcrowded houses, and approximately 1.2 million illegal settlements had no access to public utilities such as electricity, drinking water, and sanitation in 1990.[2]

Under the central-leftist Christian Democrat Presidents Patricio Aylwin (1990–1994) and Eduardo Frei (1994–2000), housing programs received a significant increase in government funding and various social programs were launched under a central policy to subsidize housing units and make home ownership affordable even for the poorest of citizens.[3] Frei, in particular, made the eradication of extreme poverty one of his key objectives, and a survey conducted in 1996 during his first term in office revealed that 23.2 percent of the population, or some 3.3 million people, continued to live below the poverty line, of which 800,000 struggled with extreme poverty.[4] A separate study that same year by the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism and the University of Chile’s Faculty of Architecture identified 972 squatter camps and informal settlements across the country. 105,888 families, equivalent to more than 500,000 people, lived in these settlements. In light of this, the Chile Barrio or the Chile Neighborhood Program was launched, and became the first public policy intervention focused on populations living in extreme poverty in precarious settlements. Apart from housing and infrastructural improvements, the inter-ministerial program also looked into social inclusion, improving job and productive capabilities, and community development. The implementation of the program extended from 1997 to 2007.

As Iquique’s last inner-city campamento or informal settlement located along one of the main north-south arteries of Iquique, Avenida Salvador Allende, and surrounded by industries and the desert range to the east, the Quinta Monroy project was a prototype for low-cost dwellings designed by the ELEMENTAL team in 2003, who had been commissioned by the Chile Barrio Program. ELEMENTAL was in fact an unusual partnership that brought together practitioners, universities, and public as well as private agencies. The consortium included the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the David Rockefeller Center of Latin American Studies at Harvard, the Universidad Católica de Chile, the Housing Ministry of Chile, and a few construction companies. The aim of the collaboration was to design minimum dwelling units that would allow maximum flexibility over time, while maintaining a broader urban, physical, as well as social cohesion. The residents who had occupied Quinta Monroy were initially highly guarded and suspicious of the development. The challenge here then was not just the mere provision of subsidized housing, but to recreate a viable neighborhood of satisfied homeowners from the campamento. Back in the 1960s, the site was in fact an agricultural area and was used for cattle grazing, but with the expansion of the city this peripheral farming land became incorporated into the urban area, and today constitutes part of central Iquique.

By 1995, under the new democratic regime, the land became the subject of dispute among the squatters, the Monroy family who held the original property rights, the city, as well as the official housing organizations. In resolving the deadlock, the Chile Barrio Program intervened and acquired the property with the intention of transforming it into a social housing project for the original occupants. The conditions were decrepit, and 60 percent of the homes in the labyrinthine encampment had no light or direct ventilation, and were devoid of basic utilities such as access to drinking water, sewage, and sanitation. Each home was constructed of waste packaging material discarded from the city’s port, and covered an area of around 30 square meters. The community was somewhat socially diverse, and the average monthly income for each household was around US$100 (54,000 pesos). The main breadwinners were more often than not the women, most of whom were single parents.[5] Hence, it was even more critical to retain these households within the original community so that the women would be able to journey to work conveniently and be able to manage their households. Taking advantage of a new housing policy – the Vivienda Social Dinámica sin Deuda, or Dynamic Social Housing Without Debt (VSDsD) – which provided a voucher in the amount of US$7,500 to each low-income family that typically would not qualify for loans, ELEMENTAL worked around this budget to cover the property acquisition, site development, and the physical construction of each dwelling. [6]

The design of the housing departed from urban precedents of the single-family detached house on its individual lot, the row house, and the high-rise, selecting instead a parallel housing typology that is based on the possibility of individual expansion over time. The plan thus was intentionally left somewhat “open” and “incomplete”, thereby providing room for growth and self-built additions thereafter, as in the case of PREVI, Lima, which still remains an active construction site. According to Alejandro Aravena of ELEMENTAL, “[they] had to bear in mind that 60 percent of each unit’s volume would eventually be self-built and therefore was unknown to [them] in particulars. The initial building had to therefore provide a supporting, unconstrained framework for improvised construction.” [7] Further, residents of Quinta Monroy were involved in the design process in the early stages through workshops and meetings organized by ELEMENTAL where they provided their feedback regarding the distribution of the units, their façades, and their preferences for the common areas.[8] The architects thus embarked on the design based on the conformance with two restrictions: (i) each house would have an initial surface area of 36 square meters to ensure that the project would be within the budget, and (ii) each home would be left “unfinished” to allow for future additions in accordance with the needs of each family.[9] A total of 93 low-rise dwelling units were thus arrayed in parallel on the site that occupied an area of 5,722 square meters. The preference for low-rise dwellings was also taking into consideration the seismically active nature of the country as a whole, and the housing units formed contiguous borders interlocked with each other and generally defined four semi-enclosed courtyards or “communities”.

ELEMENTAL worked out the most expensive and technically challenging elements of the project, including the basic structure, stairways, service cores, etc., in order to ensure that the self-construction phase would be as easy, economical, and as safe as possible for the homeowners. In fact, the strict building code for the self-construction phase was negotiated with the residents. The houses are thus stacked two levels high on nine-meter by nine-meter lots, with a patio house on the ground floor, and a duplex unit above accessed by stairs above the patio house. The ground floor unit measures six meters by six meters and can expand its width into the adjacent three meters of its lot, and an additional 18 square meters to the back; the duplex which measures three meters by six meters can claim the adjacent three-meters by six-meter-deep bay, yielding a maximum floor area of 72 square meters. In terms of the unit plans, the ground floor primary occupation space for the patio unit is generally open and typically accommodates the living room, dining area, as well as the kitchen and toilet, while the subsequent extension would typically be reserved for more private sleeping quarters. For the duplex, the primary occupation space on the lower level generally opens up to the living/dining area with a kitchen in the area behind the stairs, while the toilets are stacked directly above the kitchen, adjoining the sleeping quarters; the double-storey extensions help to double the living/dining areas as well as serve as bedrooms.

Over time, the other “halves” of the “good houses” were gradually filled in by the tenants. As Alejandro Aravena defines it, what the project tries to attain is a “‘porous’ architecture that depends and thrives on external inputs”.[10]  To him, an “ELEMENTAL house is ostensibly a home starter kit, an armature, to be filled out with the homeowners’ extensions”.[11] 
This “porosity” translates into a general adaptability where participatory design strategies and layered schemes evolve dynamically, much like Quinta da Malagueira by Siza or the PREVI scheme discussed earlier. After the completion and occupation of the project, the neighborhood is vibrant and retains an overall architectural-urban integrity. The residents, and especially the children, share a close relationship with their collectively owned courtyards that further demarcate a semi-private/public space and one that reinforces a sense of community. These courtyards are in fact not freely accessible to outsiders, and this defined territoriality reinforces the overall safety of the place, furthering the dimensions for family life. In sum, by increasing the building density and retaining the original community as much as possible, Quinta Monroy offers an alternative to the informal settlements endemic to South American cities, ranging from the campamentoes to the barrios, and favelas, and the cheap and substandard housing often associated with low-cost housing. “Social housing,” in their approach, was thus “seen as an investment and not an expense”.[12] 

ELEMENTAL thus found ways in which the initial government subsidy can ultimately enhance the value of the property, while keeping the community on the same plot of land close to the centre of the city. Socially speaking, the project thus maintained the emotional ties within the community, as well as the relationship between the place of living and the places of employment.

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Originally published in: Peter G. Rowe, Har Ye Kan, Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories, Birkhäuser, 2014.