Paper Improvisors
Extracts from “Small Change – About the Art of Practice and the Limits of Planning in Cities”
Nabeel Hamdi Published by Earthscan
Santitham Community, Chiangmai, Thailand photo © Patama Roonrakwit
How Nina lost her home and found a role, all with the aid of Patama’s little boxes.
Nina lived in one of those illegal and largely invisible settlements one finds in any city in any developing country. She and her community of some 76 families had been over the years constantly under threat of eviction, until finally it had to happen. Nina is one of those urban heroes who had been active for many years fighting eviction, negotiating rights to services and land, and later, accepting the inevitability of re-location and turning it all to her advantage. She had no career ambitions other than to raise her standard of ordinariness and with it her dignity and that of her family and her community.
In the years of struggle, she and her community had fought their way out of dependence through activism and alliance building, and had won their independence and with it, a sense of mutual respect. They had learnt to work as a collective, working their way out of exclusion and creating a new unity, a togetherness which met their common purpose, a community of interest which gave them power and worth.
The first house designed through this series of workshops was built in the first phase of the resettlement process. The owner is a woman who once claimed she knew nothing about housing design and construction, but the delightful house she built is filled with innovation, cost-cutting creativity and imagination
This is the story of how Nina and her community planned their settlement working with a young architect, Patama Roonrakwit. It starts with aspirations – with dreams of what could be – tempered as they plan their houses and settlement with the reality of limits imposed by space and money. Patama tells her own story of the planning process.
“Early in 1996, I was asked to help the Santitham Community to plan their housing design and construction. I first went to the community to talk to the people and get an idea about how they lived before, what they wanted and what kind of resources they had. I found people very keen about planning their new settlement and houses, but unsure how to build on the 6 x 14 metre plots on the new land, which were smaller than the roomy plots they rented at Santitham, which averaged around 200 square metres per family.
In the early stages of the negotiation process, two standard house types were developed by a prominent architectural firm. Both designs looked good to me, but as might have been expected, the people wanted nothing to do with them, and wanted to design their own houses.
We started the first sessions by getting to know each other and talking generally about the settlement. People are always shy [to start with] and so to break the ice, we talked about all the difficulties of making shelter in the city for a family with very little money and no land. How did each family do it, how do people use their houses, what parts of the house were most important, what changes had they made over the years? Then I asked them to draw their own existing houses with their comments about the space and functions. By this time, everyone had begun thinking about his/her house in terms of spaces and qualities which do or do not serve their daily lives. They had begun formulating ideas about what they wanted to keep or change in their new houses.
We started the second session by letting everyone draw a picture of his/her ‘dream house’ without worrying about budget or plot size. I found that despite this invitation to go wild, most people squeezed their family needs into houses that kept within the limits of extremely modest plot sizes and budgets. We pinned up all the dream houses on the wall. Most of them were very simple. No castles, no palaces, and only two houses with tenuous suggestions of a swimming pool or a home-cinema! For me this made it clear that for these people, even such a simple little house is already a ‘dream’. I asked for some volunteers to explain their dream houses to the whole group, and let the others ask questions. The people all had fun giving each other criticisms.
The next step was to make these ‘dream houses’ a little more real. We gave everybody grid paper and scaled cut-out furniture to stick on. Then they drew in their houses on this scaled plot, trying hard to squeeze in all the dream house elements and ideas. After that, everybody made rough cardboard 3-dimensional models from these plans. By now there was an element of friendly competition at work, and everybody was trying to make his/her model nicer than the others.
When all the models were made, we laid out a big site plan (same scale as the models) on the floor and asked everyone to put his/her cardboard house on the plot. Suddenly, we had a community in front of us. It looked awful, of course. Almost every house completely filled the little plot. There were no open spaces whatsoever, one roof drained onto another roof, no place for trees or air circulation. It was packed! When I asked the people whether they would like to live in this community, there was a chorus of unhesitating No’s. Then they started talking about how their new community should be. I did not have to tell them anything, no lectures about density or open space or setbacks. Everyone understood and agreed to leave a small amount of space open on each plot and then went back to readjust his/her house design accordingly. A set of site rules began to emerge.
In the next session, we divided people into groups according to family size and budget, so people with similar family sizes or budget constraints could borrow ideas from each other and help develop house designs together, more efficiently. But group members could not agree with each others’ ideas, each one insisting on his/her idea was the best. On top of that, the housebuilding budgets many of the people had been working from were much higher than their real affordability, since many were reluctant to reveal to the group the true extent of their poverty by stating such a low housing budget. This was a tricky problem but I was calm enough to ask them what we should do. At the end, the people gave us the idea of everyone somehow beginning from the ‘same structure’ but using it in different ways, according to ‘different functions’, which the people would manage by themselves. In other words we needed some ground rules.
Back in our office, we three architects sat down with the pile of designs from the people to find that common dimensional framework. The average size of the largest room was about nine or ten square metres, which could make a neat 3 x 3 metre module. This 3 x 3 metre module could also be conveniently built with and spanned by bamboo, which is cheap and widely available. So we made hundreds of small cardboard boxes, sized to scale, at 3 x 3 x 2.5 metres, each one representing a single structural unit.
Then using the ‘building blocks’, the people assembled another set of house models on their grid paper plots. All the houses were completely different in area, orientation, massing and function. Some houses were small, some were big, some were single-floor, some two-floor. The people were all happy with this refinement of their house ideas and were able to explain their house models to the larger group. By this time, we had, more or less, a set of preliminary house designs, based on this 3 x 3 metre module. Next we put the house models all together again, on the big site plan and saw how they all got along with each other. This time we could see much more open space, and could actually imagine living there. Everybody was satisfied with the sense of community that had been created.
Next we showed everyone some slides of some beautiful houses built in other countries with unconventional materials – bamboo, thatch, scrap wood, cloth. We gave everyone a simple table to list materials and quantities needed for his/her new house. First they had to see what materials they could salvage and reuse from their existing houses, and then decide what new materials they would need, and how much those materials would cost. The people divided themselves into groups and went out into the city to gather information about the prices of various building materials. When everyone came back, we were able to put together a list of construction materials and their prices – some of which were very cheap.
Using plans drawn from the box models and a simple cost estimating sheet, the people then estimated their house costs. I did not have to persuade anyone to use the cheaper ‘local’ materials rather that the more costly steel and concrete. Gradually, the houses can be upgraded, as families can afford to do so.
The first house designed through this series of workshops was built in the first phase of the resettlement process. The owner is a woman who once claimed she knew nothing about housing design and construction, but the delightful house she built is filled with innovation, cost-cutting creativity and imagination. She hired a couple of local carpenters to help her, and learned by doing. We came out to the site often and assisted as much as we could. She knew all the details and was able to deal with all the problems on site. The overall cost of her house was low, working out to about 65 per cent of its market price. Later when people asked me for details and cost figures about house designs on this settlement, I sent them to Nongyao and her neighbours for advice!”
