Mafundi Expo

Abstract

Housing supply in Sub-Saharan Africa is dominated by self-help housing in informal settlements as a consequence of rapid urban population growth in the absence of sufficient formal housing supply, bringing forth sub-standard housing conditions. Government housing strategies have not been able to halt the informal production of housing, as according to UN-Habitat currently in Africa over half of the urban population (61.7%) lives in slums and by 2050, Africa’s urban dwellers are projected to have increased from 400 million to 1.2 billion. This thesis revisits the ideas of John F.C. Turner who in the 1960s argued that successful government housing strategies in this context, depend on the alignment of government action with the priorities and forces of popular settlement. To meaningfully address the insufficient housing quality and urban sprawl resulting from the informal production of housing, the main objective of this thesis is to produce design guidelines on the typology and housing strategy that best addresses the priorities of the main actors in informal settlements; the inhabitants and the government. Therefore the rationale behind the proliferation of the informal construction of housing is first introduced, clarifying the problematic. Then the theoretical background of existing housing strategies of the provider and enabler paradigm are discussed, while deducing from housing strategies the architectural typologies. To connect the strategies in a narrative, the priorities that form the criteria of a evaluation framework are presented. Evaluation of the strategies against this framework results in a decision making tool that schematically portrays the tradeoffs in priorities and the interconnected consequences of the housing strategies. Applying this tool, a case is made for the strategy of assisted informal multi-story housing; negotiating government priorities of reduced urban sprawl and increased housing quality, while allowing for the inhabitants priorities recognised in the informal production of housing. Case studies of prototypes of this housing strategy are undertaken with the aim to specify the benefits of the informal production of housing and identify solutions for an improved housing quality and urban density. The produced set of generic guidelines on the design of a strategy of assisted informal multi-story housing, informs the redesign of the typical Urban Swahili Housing in Dar es Salaam. This redesign provides an alternative scenario for informal urbanisation in Dar es Salaam: increasing housing quality and urban density.