Towards a Participatory ‘User defined approach’ for designing housing :
People in Traditional cultures
since ancient times always knew , how to make their buildings & homes as
per their needs. The farmer’s hut was always built by the farmer. Even today
right from the Hausas from Nigeria to the Native villagers of Kutch in India
make their own abodes from a simple material like Mud. The knowledge of
construction always got transferred through generations as oral procedures or
sometimes as in places like Kerala or Rajasthan , where the house making
evolved in form of sophisticated art form in cities, there were guilds of
traditional craftsmen who worked in close team with the owners. Making one’s
own house was a traditional ritual. In Native American Red Indians , the
nomadic tribe women got together to build the Tipi tents. A decade ago, when I
was living in Bhutan, I have seen adobe mud wall houses being built in the
local villages, where people sang as they beat the mud in the wall using large
logs. When people built their own house, they knew how much area they require,
what are the spaces in the house, where to sleep, where to cook, how much light
should come into their rooms, where will their cattle stay etc. etc. After
building the house, people used to decorate the inside with great care using
locally available materials & design patterns, inherent to their cultures.
Hence a Banni hut in Kutch was never the same as a Hausa mud house in Nigeria
even if both arose in desert plains.
What is the ‘Big’ issue about standardized housing?
Compare this with the modern day
house building activity in large cities. If we consider the people residing in
cities as roughly divided into 3 types of economic classes – Poor, Rich &
Middle class, we find a typical process being followed by each class of people.
The Poor seldom have a choice of ownership. The poor man makes his hut or a
shelter on a pavement or even illegally in a slum using whatever material that
is available. Most of the times, the house is made by his own family &
friends. What it interesting that even though the living conditions are
wretched & unhealthy, still the poor man exercises the ‘Right’ to define
his own living space by himself in less means. The Rich man has the entire
world at his service. The Rich man buys a large plot of land, hires the best
designers & contractors to make the house’ Exactly the Way as He Wants’ or
requires. Thus the rich man also exercises his ‘Right’ to define his own living
space without any limitations. The Middle class which is the maximum of us
living in large cities cannot be as daring as the Poor man & cannot afford
to live like the Rich. Thus he cannot make a illegal hut , nor can he build his
own bungalow. Thus when he wants his own house, he goes to the ‘Developer’ who
makes building with several standardized design units. The so called ‘Ready
possession’ apartment gives the middle class families almost no option to
exercise their ‘Right’ to define their own living space except spending
lavishly on exclusive furniture items & false ceilings with infinite lights
! When everything from a rigid layout to
location of toilets , plumbing & electrical layouts are predefined by the
developer, the end user has to really ‘adapt’ his lifestyle to live in a given
situation. Thus the ‘Real loser’ is the Middle class which goes ‘Unexpressed’
& Design ‘Suppressed’ in terms of defining their own spaces.
The standardized units housing
even though economically practical is not the answer to the housing needs of
middle class people. Nevertheless the
bridge between requirement versus available housing stock in cities needs to be
taken care of & hence mass housing projects cannot be avoided especially in
large cities. Can there be a ‘Middle
path’ where a house can still be part of a large ecologically responsive system of structures & services, but yet
can grow as per needs, can change spaces as per requirements &
aesthetically define itself as per the various cultures in cities? Various
experiments have been made by designers & philosophers in the world before
on this kind of issues. Growing mass housing structures have been designed in
form of pre fabricated units.
What has the world done till now?
Notable experiment is a movement
in Europe called ‘Open Architecture’, in which an open structure in form of
slabs & service cores is left for people to design their own house. Even
though this movement has evolved in Netherlands under guidance of Architect
Urban designer Prof Ar.John Habrakan, projects have been built in far off lands
in Japan based upon it. On a larger
scale experiments have been carried out to define Living neighborhoods by Ar.
Christopher Alexander based upon his new theory in Urban Design & Pattern
language. A Generative code is sought for based upon the premise that Community
housing can be created by people themselves, those who live & belong to the
land instead of being based upon monetary profitable systems like housing built
by developers. Another recent development theory is one called ‘Emergent
Urbanism’ where proponents argue that instead of planning a development to its
last detail, a city can grow organically as self organized built forms defined
by people along certain major network routes like street ways . On the Indian
front, even the Government authorities have now realized that standardized mass
housing when built for rehabilitating slums or project affected settlements
gets unoccupied & rejected by most of the end users occupying the houses.
In Navi Mumbai , Pune & various cities in India, experiments have been made
to give people only a plinth & basic drainage water supply services (BSUP
schemes) which create flexible framework where people will build for themselves
an incremental house within their means. People centric co –operative housing
movement has always been there since many years in Indian cities especially in
cities like Delhi. In case of Privately built
mass housing , The day when, developers see mass housing beyond just a profit
generating enterprise, will make them realize that people actually require a
flexible systems within which they can define their own spaces instead of
standardized rigid living cells they are selling today.
What could be the New approach?
"At the
core... is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses,
streets and communities. This idea... comes simply from the observation that
most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by
the people".
—Christopher Alexander, A Pattern Language, front bookflap
The ‘Pattern Language’ written by
Ar. Christopher Alexander is an Epic book in Modern Architecture which explains
design as patterns, corresponding to behavioral systems of people & how do
people live. The obvious references in the above sentence are from the studies of
medieval towns in Europe & Asia, where the design of the house was an
outcome of cultural & social patterns defined by the people themselves. Also
due to then limited recourses of material & technology the houses, always
responded to the climatic & geomorphic context.
This concept of self definition of space is so historic in the context
of human settlement, that almost all the traditional cities & houses have
been built or at most defined by the people themselves. The advent of
standardization & mass production of materials has made it difficult for
people to exercise these space sensibilities. Also the nature of space &
its use in the house has been flexible & dynamic. The traditional Japanese
wooden houses came up on a structural grid based upon the dimensions of a ‘tatami’
mats, which were laid all over the house interiors. The exterior walls were in
form of open able screens to let the nature come in a better season. The
interior rooms could be changed when ever required because they were defined by
movable ‘fusuma’ light weight internal partitions made out of lattice framed paper
screens.
It is a common fact that, In case
of today’s mass housing schemes, people tend to modify their house & their
surroundings over a period of time to suit their needs. Even today, when people
get changes done in their pre built houses or do ‘Interiors’, they are actually
trying to Define their own space which comes as a natural instinct to them but
such an endeavor can succeed in only a limited manner as most of the required
adaptations & modifications get defined based upon the existing framework of
structure, electrical & plumbing system used for the entire building.
The final fact remains today,
when we have accepted mass housing & we cannot go back to the incremental
old city houses or the farmhouses anymore. Hence there are few things people
will never be able to build by themselves in today’s housing. These are-The
floor slab, The roof slab & the water supply & drainage services. That’s all is that is required.
The answer is that, Within a flexible framework of structure, building services
& maybe a defined external façade, it would be definitely possible for
people to define their own spaces according to their own needs & lifestyle.
Even cities today can be built by
the people. City is actually an
abstract concept. A number of neighborhoods make a city. The neighborhoods have
plots, roads & open spaces. The current towns planning systems & acts
in India have been borrowed from its colonial past. In a free country even if
major road structure is defined by the government & also built, All the
plot re configuration in the growing suburbs & also for large scale
redevelopment can be done by the land owners coming together to form a cohesive
& cooperative group. All it would take is redefining certain legal frameworks
to exploit such possibilities. The so called land uses allocated to land
parcels will become building uses like in our old cities which has mixed use
development. These communities will be ‘Livable’ & ‘Walk able’ neighborhoods
defined between streets with broad sidewalks coupled with efficient mass
transit systems. Interestingly the seemingly impossible processes about which I
am writing have happened few hundred years ago in India. The planned city of
Jaipur only defined grids of street & character of buildings on the edges
of street. All the internal streets & neighborhoods are organic & built
by people. Even our own Pune witnessed the laying of ‘Peth’ areas during the
Peshwas period in the same process. We will find straight laid out roads in the
Peth areas but the internal plot configurations was defined by the various
communities who occupied the Peths. Even though seemingly congested for the Automobile
to get in, Look at the interesting
spaces what we have got in the old cities.
So what New am I offering? Nothing …Let all work together, people. Designers
& executioners to better Livable cities.
Ar. Hrishikesh Ashtekar
Credits & Refrences - Various websites by Ar John
Habrakan, Ar. Christopher Alexander, Emergent Urbanism, Books – Traditions in
Architecture – Crouch & Johnson, Pune the Queen of Deccan & few other
books
