Workshop Mentor Stuart Smith started the conversation on affordable housing by acknowledging the vast metrics we are dealing with today – with 55% of the global population, 4.2 billion people inhabit our cities and 1.1 billion people in informal settlements or inadequate housing. Urban migration and population growth creates pressure on the prices, and almost every city has an affordable housing crisis. Although political solutions are needed – architecture, design and construction can improve the current situation.

To meet projected demand, we would need to construct 100,000 housing units per day until 2050. But the solution is not just to build more rapidly since this would be economically and ecologically unsustainable. It’s not just about building housing units: the community, local services and infrastructure are important elements. “Most times, people don’t want to move, they just want their basic needs to be improved.” Stuart unwrapped the “tower block typology” which has been considered a failure in the past – but with careful design and management, can sustainably deliver affordable housing.

Affordable housing is interwoven with the carbon footprint of building materials, a growing demand for materials, and the enormous waste produced by the construction industry without counting demolitions. Although “cities are our great invention” – this invention is far from complete. Stuart quoted Ed Glaser “So much of what humankind has achieved over the past three millennia has come out of the remarkable collaborative creations that come out of cities. We are a social species.”

Tatiana Bilbao states the importance of architecture lies in its role of providing a primary form of care and shaping the way humans live. Her main interest has always been the domestic environment as it is the most essential unit of human existence. Tatiana Bilbao explained how the previous generation never thought of the city as a project. According to her the city was considered to be shaped by “abstract or organic forces” that are in reality “market forces”. Within this context, she explained how those forces determine who lives in what territory, and therefore expel most of the population out of the cities.

Presenting the different models of cities that have shaped the way of living in every decade, she concluded that we now live in a society is shaped by consumerism and is designed for humans to be as productive as possible. In that city, the house was merely a place to rest and where people depended on the infrastructure surrounding it to exist. This model has been replicated on a broad scale, founded in the thought that it delivered all human necessities.

Tatiana Bilbao noted that the United Nations declared housing to be a human right in 1947 and that in Mexico it is a constitutional right: however, the legal “minimums” have become what the market views as “maximums”. Tatiana Bilbao considers the idyllic “dream house” created in the United States to be one of the key problems because it has now become a desire for everyone that is impossible to fulfil.

Tatiana Bilbao proposed a new model called the city of care that puts in the centre the notions of reproductive labour, affective relations, and the feminist struggle; an architectural revolution that starts with the understanding of housework, community and that respects different ways of living.

Maria Vassilakou opened her seminar by noting her vision as Vice Mayor of Vienna was to promote the role of social housing in creating the city. Vienna’s rapid growth creates the challenge of accommodating an additional 20,000 people each year – who require not only affordable housing, but life infrastructure including schools, hospitals, and other services.

She explained that Vienna’s approach is to support affordable housing from an urban quarters perspective, using housing strategies to develop a city that is “a place for life”. According to her, this way of thinking was inherited through 100 years of housing tradition in Vienna. After World War I, the government of Vienna took on one of the most ambitious housing plans, putting an emphasis on providing good life quality through implementing open and green spaces, communal areas, libraries and services, among other facilities directed towards modern working families. Presenting various examples, Maria Vassilakou showed how, in the masterplan of Vienna, affordable housing is at the centre of the city to ensure there are no excluded communities.

Maria Vassilakou closed her seminar by enumerating the three pillars of the Vienna strategy: local land, subsidised construction and subsidised individuals that can afford the housing. The former vice mayor stated that the philosophy around social housing should always have a focus on green spaces, promoting walking and cycling over vehicles with collective parking on the edges, broad social and use mix, transport access and collaborative housing projects. As a closing reflection, she identified public-private involvement, having a clear idea of the city that you want, strong leadership, legal tools, affordability, liveability, and community involvement as key factors to the Vienna model’s success.

Alejandro Aravena began his seminar identifying the “3S Menace” – scale, speed, and scarcity of means – as the main causes of the affordable housing crisis. He asserted that frequently, the resources and timeframes provided by funding governments are insufficient to promote efficient solutions to this pressing crisis. Architects can only work with “affordability” as the type of buildings that are created under these parameters cannot be considered a house.

To be able to fill the gap of housing demand, he conceived an Affordable Supra-Structure that supplies the basis of providing housing to the population in need. This “unit of basic service”, as he calls it, consists of building the parts of the house that require more technical knowledge and leaving the remaining structure for the house to be built by the owners. Alejandro Aravena explained how this model breaks the trajectory of affordable housing – which typically loses value after construction. With this scheme, the house can be completed and increase in value, not only performing in terms of environmental sustainability, but also becoming a tool to overcome poverty. 

Using numerous examples, Aravena explained the reasons why slums appear adjacent to cities, and why creating satellite cities of affordable housing does not seem to be a good solution. As he explained, people are willing to give up on life quality to be near opportunities, jobs, schools, healthcare. He illustrated the importance of enabling different models, and distributing land efficiently while taking in consideration that the houses will be completed over time.

To conclude, Alejandro Aravena emphasized the importance of facts in making a successful model. He noted that a family can live reasonably well in 80m², however the budget that his practice was given would finance 40m² of space. By supplying this “half-good house” it created a path for the owners to complete the build over time. As he stated, cities reflect societies, particularly in developing countries, so by setting the correct rules of play and promoting the participation of the people, architecture can achieve great results.

Jonathan Ledgard focussed on the growing population of Africa. In 2050, Africa is projected to have a population of around 2.7 billion people, and one quarter of the world’s children. He emphasized that, in the midst of a climate crisis and a biodiversity collapse, most of the growth of the planet will be in Africa. He talked about a rapidly growing population where most of the young adults won’t find a job in their lifetime and don’t have the possibility of acquiring affordable housing. He explained that most cities in Africa have a dominant center and over time secondary towns nearby are created, but they are not well interconnected.

Jonathan Ledgard demonstrated the case in South Sudan where an area twice the size of Belgium is a wetland with no roads. The increase of rainfall in Central Africa has raised the water levels in the rivers that have then flooded many villages and more than 1 million people have lost everything and are displaced into refugee camps. While these communities have proven to be resilient, creative, and dynamic, they are held back by climate change, poverty, bad leadership and ecological stress.

Using current examples drawn from the Great Lakes Region of Africa, he explored security, design, equity, ecology and technology choices for secondary towns and their surroundings. He highlighted the issue of the importation and imposition of steel, concrete and constructive solutions that have no respect for the African context or local needs. The importance of achieving a circular economy is enormous in a region that cannot afford any other option. The use of local materials and understanding of the climate and specific necessities of the region is crucial to find the right solution for the rapid growth of secondary towns in Africa. This lecture provided the attendees with a perspective on relevant macro trends and suggested some new thinking on enabling the potential of some of the fastest growing towns on the planet.

Referencing his work at the renowned design firm bureau SLA, Peter van Assche articulated a collection of new architectural repertoires for a circular economy. From architecture to the journeys of Gulliver, Models of Doom, the Anthropocene, Alice in Wonderland, László Moholy-Nagy, hobbit houses and the making of toasters, the seminar covered a wide range of concepts that aimed to trigger the imagination.

Emphasising that “in a circular economy, there is no waste and raw materials are used over and over again”, he noted that more than half of all waste is waste from construction and infrastructure – that is: waste resulting from the designs by architects. The transition to a circular economy will mean a fundamental transformation across the full breadth of the field of construction and has a series of serious implications for the architectural discipline. These new system logics will, according to him, not only provide sustainable architecture but will offer solutions for societal challenges that traditional design does not offer.

Continuing with an explanation of the inspirations and technical aspects of projects such as the Cultural Heart Berlijnplein, People’s Pavilion or the Pretty Plastic Plant, Peter van Assche proposed one of the main motivations behind future architecture should be to promote the value of a closed- loop or circular construction system, which involves thinking beyond the life of the building, so that little or no waste is produced as a result, exemplified by the use of plastics of these buildings in particular.

Peter van Assche concluded by noting the lack of proper regenerative strategies as part of an architectural design and the likelihood of demolition as an inherent feature of a building. With a different design strategy, intelligent reuse may be more self-evident. But how do you do that? Which tools do architects have to ensure that their creations are not a problem, but a blessing in thirty years’ time? He urged the audience to embrace new modes of regenerative thinking and to explore various regenerative design strategies that will produce more sustainable architectures.

How do we ensure that we achieve sustainable and healthy principles in the design process of a building? How do we measure something so abstract as wellbeing? These are some of the questions posed by Susana Saiz in her seminar.

Out of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, housing is critical for 13 of them, and is crucial in terms of health, education, and standard of living. Susana Saiz explained that health is typically considered only in terms of physical health but should be more holistic and take into account the environment we live in, nutrition, as well as psychological and social aspects. There are five determinants of health, genetics, behaviors, environmental and physical influences, medical care, and social factors.

Susana Saiz emphasized how the built environment affects physical, mental, and social well-being – and that building design, components, and materials can help achieve a healthier city by creating uplifting places in which to live. The urban environment affects mobility, contact with nature, healthy nutrition, and other aspects that directly influence physical and mental health.

Wellbeing in the built environment can be measured through different lenses and parameters, the physical determinants of health like green space, ventilation, lighting and air quality, however mental health measurements are often more difficult to qualify. She concluded her seminar by stating that the objective is to promote a new design model of affordable housing that places people at the center, building sustainable homes, rooted in place for future generations.

Housing, more specifically the right to adequate housing, was recognized under the right to an adequate standard of living, in both the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Yet, the problem of providing sufficient affordable housing for all is one that has still not been addressed to its fullest extent, despite it being an important component of the UN’s 2030 Agenda. In this light, the Norman Foster Foundation, in association with the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, organized the first edition of their “Public Debates on Cities: Affordable Housing”, bringing together an esteemed panel of speakers to discuss global scenarios surrounding housing for all in the cities of the future.

Each of the experts was given a five-minute slot to elucidate their own perspective on the problem at hand, alongside avenues towards solutions discovered through their individual practices. While Peter van Assche stressed on the need for community and process-oriented solutions, Tatiana Bilbao dove into how “architecture can create platforms for people to experience and develop their own existence, accommodating life as a process.”

Jonathan Ledgard’s presentation outlined the gravity of the housing situation that cities of the future will face, particularly with respect to the speed at which the problem is hurtling in our direction, faster than most can even begin to comprehend. Finally, Maria Vassilakou presented her own experiences working as a public official, citing a three- fold strategy – “Affordability, Livability, and Community” - for building better cities with high urban quality of life. A panel discussion moderated by Stuart Smith followed, where the panels’ cultural and professional diversity was put on full show, each commenting on different facets of the problem as seen in their individual geographical contexts.

During the second segment, a more intimate discourse between the two Pritzker Prize Laureates, Norman Foster and Alejandro Aravena took center stage, with both architects presenting their own outlooks on participatory design, the need for simplification, sustainable construction, and means to politically define ownership in the domain of affordable housing. The development of the built environment and the responsibility of everyday citizens in directing this evolution was also a central theme during the discussion; As Norman Foster himself concluded: “And in the end, everything is about design. Combating climate change is about design.”

Marcus Ming Fricke, Leticia Izquierdo and Maria Papadimitraki

The group explored the possibilities of diversifying the use of a zone underused in the center of the city that is Theresienwiese, that is a forty hectares undeveloped land used only during two weeks for the Oktoberfest. This land is very close to the center and central station and could be a great opportunity to develop a hybrid model of housing buildings that allowed its use during those two weeks for the traditional parties without leaving the land underused for the rest of the year in a city that needs a lot of housing projects.

On the ground floor the program included many services and flexible uses that could be interchangeable for when the Oktoberfest was in place and an intervention to regrow nature in the land that had been cover by concrete for years, bringing back nature to coexist with the housing developments and to improve community building in the area.

Exploring the architectural solutions that might work in this area, the group decided to include on the first floor of the housing buildings a buffer zone to distance the public and private programs and a modular project to let the users participate in the design of their houses.

Shannon Hui, Keiron Curn de Nobriga and Michael Zajakowski

Exploring different participatory and urbanistic solutions, the group decided to propose the ‘East Garfield Park Community Land Trust’ on the west side of Chicago in a neighbourhood where 43% of the population lives below the poverty line and the crime is nice hundred times the national average. This fund will tackle housing development and home ownership, street community life and economic development through the intervention in vacant lots and maximizing the opportunities of the neighbourhood.

The project started from the reference of Vienna on public-private partnerships and place sensitivity broad up by Tatiana Bilbao. The land trust would be funded by a 2 percent tax on the cultural centre and the property owners, not affecting the actual people that live there because most of them are renters. With that fund they would start a model divided in three stages for developing the neighbourhood. These stages were first building of community spaces, second residential and small scale commercial and third moving to home ownership and large scale commercial starting with the pre-existing community fabric. Phase cero would be building the basic infrastructure needed to create a safe and positive environment.

Ismaeel Davids, Nabila Larasati Pranoto, Amna Pervaiz and Parshav Sheth

Mumbai is the economic capital of India and for that there has been a huge amount of migration. This situation summed to the lack of infrastructure and affordable housing, has created a landscape of fragmentation resulting on people taking the matter in their own hands to provide shelter for their families and fulfil their needs. In the pathway that leads to the entrance of Mumbai there is Padwal Nagar, an industrial neighbourhood of immigrants on the search for work that settled anywhere there was available slot, leaving the area with no common spaces for integration and community development.

Through studing the pre-existing community dynamics where people are already engaging in economic activities that could be oriented to make the community self- sufficient and sharing spaces for cooking and cleaning; they wanted to change the conversation from affordable housing to essential homes by designing a communal infrastructure that could foster the activities they are already sharing and include the community in a participatory process of design.

This new model will separate the activities and spaces of the houses depending on if they were shareable or private, creating a community centre that gathered all the shared activities and building the private areas of the houses around it in a vertical way without using that muc land space. That way every family had access to all the infrastructure needed and had space for private familiar dynamics. The infrastructure was designed to be self-sufficient and sustainable improving the life quality of the families of the neighbourhood.