participatory design | low - income housing by hector abarca
In 1976 Vancouver hosted one of the most not well- pondered world events: the United Nations Conference on Human Settlements , known as Habitat ’76, a milestone that reunited the most diverse housing and planning experts of a polarised world and unified them in one direction. Habitat ’76 recognised that is not development but underdevelopment and poverty that is the leading cause of environmental degradation. Government officials and NGOs – the participants of 132 countries, reached the conclusion in the final report, The Vancouver Declaration of Human Settlements, that housing, adequately serviced, is a basic human right and that governments must ensure its access. The recommendations were bold, enthusiastic and realistic. The demand for an authentic shift to housing as a human right was not an empty desire; a few months before, Portugal led Europe in the adoption of housing rights in its constitution and laws, followed by most of Western Europe (the exceptions were Ireland and Italy). In like manner, Latin American countries made an effort to legislate and enforce an adequate standard of living, among them Peru which in its 1979 constitution included the family’s right to a decent home and that the state was obliged to guarantee access to housing as a basic need. Those words reflected an almost forgotten, yet unique, housing program enacted in Lima a few years before. The Experimental Housing Project - PREVI its Spanish acronym – is still considered the last large-scale and comprehensive endeavour made by the combined Western world to develop a model for social housing in a developing society. Three PREVI pilot projects were set up. PP1: new construction of low-cost experimental housing aimed to maximise the efficiency of resources and reduce hard costs by repetition over a larger scale. PP2: urban renewal and improvement of shanty towns and inner city slums. PP3: site and services for families of very low income with no ownership of land. A fourth project, PP4, was added for disaster emergency response after a 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit in the north of Peru in October of 1970 destroying 1.5 million houses and killing 70,000 people. Once upon a time we made plans – we drew elegant lines on paper and we built handsome balsa wood models – our own identity was clear and our tools for changing the world explicit and concrete. — H P Oberlander on Habitat ‘76 The Hinge in a Decade for Change , 1986
rights housing
development competitions density
Revisiting PREVI housing as a basic right from Lima toVancouver
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top: Book covers of the PREVI volumes published after the conclusion of the four PREVI-UN projects published by the Ministry of Defence, Lima 1977 [Previ: Proyecto Experimental de Vivienda – 27 volumenes, Ministerio de Vivienda, Lima, 1980] left: Current view of the Alameda Central, the pedestrian main street that articulates the Experimental Neighbourhood Unit, flanked by an unrecognizable Project I -5 by Toivo Korhonen (Finland) expanded and adjusted through the time with no professional guidance, as planned.
Michelle Llona R
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