Social Housing in Iquique y Renca

Chile has developed a fairly successful low-cost public housingpolicy, which has systematically addressed the housing deficit. The policy subsidizes demand (not supply), leaving the responsibility for construction in the private sector, and targeting the homeowner as the chief beneficiary. Elemental operated as part of the program launched by the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism in 2001, which targeted the poorest sectors of the community. The program, called “Dynamic, Debt-Free, Low-Cost Housing,” consists of a state subsidy of US$9,700, plus a savings fund for each family (US$300), with which the lot, the urbanization, and the house can be paid for.Our contribution consists of seeing the issue of housing as an investment in society, rather than as a cost, so that the subsidy to the families can be properly appreciated. We identified a set of design variables whereby the dwelling could be evaluated. Since the cost of construction and urbanization is more or less stable, the factor that allows for saving is the value of the lot. Low-cost housing tends therefore be located on the urban periphery, where land is less expensive, but far from opportunities for work, health services, education, and recreation. This creates enormous belts of social conflict and inequality.We attempted therefore to locate these projects in better neighborhoods. We designed high-density (but not overcrowded) typologies so that the higher cost of the land could be shared by a larger number of families. Then we introduced collective space: a common property with restricted access, which would foster the social networking essential to the success of such fragile enclaves.Since 50% of the constructed surface area is to be built by the residents themselves, the typologies had to be sufficiently flexible for expansion to take place within the structure. We sought to offer a framework for spontaneous construction (without trying to control it), in order to prevent the deterioration of the urban surroundings and at the same time to leave the process of expansion in the hands of the families themselves. We opted for providing middle-class housing. We offer the parts that the families would not be able to construct for themselves: the bathroom, the kitchen, the staircase. In this way we hope to provide architectural tools for the solution of a non-architectural problem: overcoming poverty.

 
Iquique

The government asked us to solve a difficult equation: to settle one hundred families who for thirty years had illegally occupied an area of half a hectare in the center of Iquique, a city in the desert. In spite of the high price of the land for a low-cost housing project, it was considered essential to avoid settling these families on the periphery. At the same time, we were required to work with the framework of the Ministry of Housing’s “Dynamic, Debt-Free, Low-Cost Housing” program, which targets the neediest families, and consists of a US$7,500 subsidy for each family to be used to purchase the lot and pay for construction and urbanization work.

If we had decided on one unit per lot, even with the small lotstypical of low-cost public housing, there would have been room for only thirty families on the land. Instead of designing the best possible 7,500- dollar unit for each family, we asked ourselves what kind of building could be built for one hundred families at a cost of US$750,000.We designed a building with only a first and last storey, with potential for both horizontal and vertical expansion. In this way we were able to identify a set of design variables that gave added value to the residences.By regrouping the one hundred families into four groups of 20 or 30 each, an urban scale was achieved that is small enough to foster dialogue between neighbors but not so small that it eliminates already existing social networks.

 
Renca

The commission called for housing for 170 families on a two-hectare lot where there had been a garbage dump before. In order for construction to begin, the soil had to be improved to a depth of 2.5 meters, enormously increasing the cost of the land. The families were squatting illegally in the proximity of the site, having purchased the land with their subsidies. In addition to these difficulties, the site had other restrictions due to the neighboring lots, which required some space to be ceded. Paradoxically, this made things easier, since the more land there was that had to be ceded, the less there was that had to be improved, but it did entail the pressures of much higher density.

The final design consists of a structural wall with a two-storey program which functions as firewall, partition, and insulation, and contains the more complex parts of the dwelling: bathroom, kitchen, staircase, and ducts. Each “program wall” is placed three meters from the next so that expansions can be eventually made between them. Given the weather in Santiago, we decided to wrap this intervening space in fiber cement and a roof, simplifying eventual expansion.
On an urban scale, we designed the units around circulations with a single access for each group of families (ranging in number from eight to twenty), in order to facilitate the control and maintenance of the communal spaces. The compactness of the typology allowed the entire complex to be pushed to the south, freeing up a strip of land to the north to pile up some of the debris that had been removed. This not only saved the cost of getting rid of the material but also covered up the area where the families had lived in inhuman conditions.

Alejandro Aravena (Santiago, 1967) graduated as an architect from the Universidad Católica de Chile in 1992 and did post-graduate work in theory and history at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia. He established his own practice in 1994. He is a professor at the Universidad Católica de Chile and the director of Elemental. His work has won awards at the Venice Architecture Biennial (1991) and the XII Bienal de Arquitectura de Santiago, and qualified as a finalist for the Mies van der Rohe Prize in 2000.