+ RECENT PUBLICATION [Journal of Architectural Education]

JOURNAL OF ARCHTECTURAL EDUCATION / 2019

Mutirão: The Architecture of Agency

URBAN REDEVELOPMENT | INFORMAL RENTAL HOUSING | HOUSING POLICY | COMPARATIVE FIELD-BASED RESEARCH

This article examines the mutirão, Brazil’s participatory variation on the “sites and services” incremental housing models that were popular in the 1970s. I argue that to be successful, architects involved in the production of contemporary incremental housing models must move beyond typological historicism and address historical patterns of socio-spatial segregation, architecture’s historical lack of attention to the political economy of housing, and the spatial agencies that underlie low-income urban environments. These deeper insights can help the architectural discipline approach the global housing crisis through the material patterns that communities make for themselves, central to which is rental housing.

Learn more by reading the article.