Social Housing Design Collaborative

​

 

The Social Housing Design Collaborative is a non-profit organisation registered in Colombia. It studies the social, cultural, economic, and regulatory dimensions of social housing, and develops adaptable, culturally specific alternatives to standardised provision. We work with universities, local authorities, and residents, and we welcome collaboration from researchers, educators, and housing providers.

 

The Collaborative was founded by Felipe Hernández (University of Cambridge) Liliana Andrea Clavijo (Universidad del Valle), and Gustavo Cosme (Studio Cosme Paisaje & Arquitectura), following their research in Llano Verde, a social housing scheme in Cali, Colombia, where most residents are internally displaced Afro-descendants. The houses provided satisfied residents' immediate needs, but long-term habitation revealed the shortcomings of standardised housing. Against government regulation, residents made significant and necessary transformations to accommodate their actual needs. These transformations made a fully subsidised scheme expensive and diluted the benefits of a programme conceived to assist a population in need. The scheme had not anticipated the social, cultural, and economic differences among its residents.

 

The research led to the HC-01 Prototype, a social housing unit that responds to the cultural practices of Afro-descendant communities from the Pacific Coast and to the permanent transformation of Colombian cities. It is adaptable, allowing residents to alter it quickly to suit individual needs; flexible, accommodating changes of use over time; and incremental, allowing growth from two to four storeys. Most importantly, it lets residents generate an income from their home from the day they move in thanks to a multi-functional ground-floor level.

 

We are building the prototype with support from the Centre for Global Equality at the University of Cambridge. The Social Housing Design Collaborative organises summer schools with Colombian universities Universidad del Valle and Universidad del Rosario that study housing in peripheral urban settlements. We offer courses on housing and on pertinencia cultural, the principle that housing should respond to the specific practices, values, and expectations of its residents. We also advise local authorities on social housing provision, particularly on areas such as design and urban regulation.

In the future, we aim to support interdisciplinary housing research and offer residencies to researchers.