Designed Self-Help

Designing Self-help sounds like a contradiction in terms. Indeed, a great deal of the scholarly accounts on self-help housing excludes the agency of the designer, stressing instead the roles of the policy maker and the owner-builder. In the architecture discipline, from the late 1950s through the 1980s the notions of open form, group form and open building, gained momentum as a reconceptualization of the relation between author and addressee. Yet, while pursuing similar goals, assisted self-help housing was a matter of interest mainly for social scientists, even though it became pervasive as an affordable housing policy in the developing world. In this paper I discuss the importance of the design decision-making process in assisted self- help housing, reshaping the latter as part and parcel of the rationale of the idea of open building. This paper will address two key questions: To what extent the agency of the designer in assisted self-help housing alienates or emancipates the other stakeholders in the process? And how can design expertise contribute for creating a more open and inclusive participation of the many actors involved in self-help housing strategies? I will examine the case of the Malagueira neighbourhood, a housing estate designed by Álvaro Siza in the late 1970s for the periphery of the Portuguese city of Évora. Supported by archival material, interviews, and empirical observations, I will discuss the contribution of design expertise to activate a productive negotiation between collective identity and individual expression. This paper will explore the intertwined relation between policy makers, designers and the grassroots to critically reflect on the use of self-help strategies to foster citizens’ participation in the design-decision making process. The paper asserts that, in Malagueira, a carefully crafted design strategy to accommodate growth and change over time contributed to foster ownership and to promote social inclusion.