How Is Mutual-Help Housing Participatory? A Critical Discourse Analysis of Socio-Spatial Responses to Informality in Chile and Brazil

ABSTRACT

Participation is a prerequisite for mutual-help housing projects aimed at the sustainable transformation of informal urban areas. Given the ambiguity in how participation is understood in such projects, a deeper understanding of the discourses and socio-spatial constraints that frame participatory design processes is needed. To unpack the problem-solving narratives implicit in participatory design projects, this paper employs a critical discourse approach to analyse two prominent mutual-help housing projects in Chile and Brazil. The findings reveal that while both cases showcase dwellers’ participation as a construction labour force, their discourses on participation follow distinct orientations that are influenced by their policy environments and the problems they target, such as material poverty and social injustice. These findings aim to provide urban designers and practitioners with a conceptual tool to rigorously examine participatory design practices and to better constrain the use of the concept.

KEYWORDS:

• Participation
• mutual-help housing
• discourse analysis
• informality
• social justice
• sustainable urban transformation

1. Introduction

While the concept of public participation has been highly analysed in urban planning discourse across diverse geographies and scales, the participation of residents in design processes has only recently gathered momentum, especially for housing projects in contexts of scarcity and informality. Within mainstream urban design and architecture cultures, a plethora of aspirational concepts such as “participatory design” (Hofmann 2014), “design activism” (Bell and Wakeford 2008), “public interest design” (Kubey 2018), and especially “tactical urbanism” (Gadanho 2014; Lydon, Garcia, and Duany 2015) has arisen to describe the positive impact of the participation of neighbours and dwellers, architects and advocacy groups in projects developed either in the absence of, or in parallel to formal planning mechanisms. Examples of such urban strategies include incremental housing (Balestra 2014), land titling and regularization (Satterthwaite 2012), social and physical infrastructure upgrading (Haiek 2012), or land invasion tactics (Cruz 2005). Such projects and concepts not only contribute to reducing the pre-existing housing gaps, but more broadly to also upgrade informal areas in alignment with the first target of the Sustainable Development Goal 11 (United Nations 2015). Recent research describing the environmental benefits of slum upgrading for climate change adaptation and mitigation (Núñez Collado and Wang 2020; Satterthwaite et al. 2020) hints at the potential of such settlement upgrading practices to guide the sustainable urban transformation of informal areas (Wolfram and Frantzeskaki 2016); however, the linkages between urban sustainability transformation theory (Childers et al. 2014) and informal settlement upgrading are yet to be fully developed.

Against this backdrop, the scholarly attention towards the examination of participatory methodologies within the field of urban design is limited to a few marginal exceptions (De Geest and De Nys-Ketels 2019), especially in contexts associated with informality, where participatory strategies may attempt to challenge the strong power imbalances experienced by marginalized stakeholders. This lack of attention may be attributed to the predominant dissemination of projects in trade publications that focus on their spatial qualities and posit participation as a component of design strategies. Given the limited examination of urban scale, participatory design strategies, this paper aims to explore how the narratives of participation in renowned housing projects take into account their socio-spatial contexts and produce distinct socio-spatial effects. To do so, the paper examines the discourses of participation inherent in two internationally acclaimed mutual-housing projects. In the following sections, we first introduce the notion of citizen participation in urban planning and design before presenting the study’s methodology and cases. This is followed by a detailed description of the case study analyses, and by a discussion outlining the implications of our findings for urban planning and design practice. Through this discussion the paper aims to contribute to bridging the gap between the theories and practices of participation in urban design, and to explore ways in which urban design participatory methods can be evaluated.

2. Citizen Participation in Mutual-Help Housing

Public, community, and citizen participation have become key concepts worldwide in urban planning discourse since the mid-twentieth century. In the context of high-income countries on the one hand, these concepts arose as a reaction against a technocratic model of planning (Friedmann 1993) whose apparent neutrality led to exclusionary zoning practices such as so-called “redlining” (Davidoff and Gold 1971). At that time, the dichotomies between the normative orientations and the practices of planning precipitated an epistemological revision that saw participation incorporated as a form of advocacy planning (Davidoff 1965) and later as a communicative action towards collaborative planning (Healey 1997). In international development debates during the 1960s on the other hand, the idea of participation became associated with the concept of aided self-help housing policies, fostered within architecture culture by the British architect John F.C. Turner (Kozak 2016). In subsequent decades, and especially after the Habitat I conference in 1976, participatory methods have been progressively advocated by municipalities as well as multilateral organizations such as the UN and the World Bank (de Castro Mazarro 2022).

To avoid the abuses of the term “participation”, which quickly became employed widespread in planning practice given its positive connotations, Sherry Arnstein (1969) provided a normative characterization of citizen participation rooted in its potential to provide social justice. Arnstein defined citizen participation as “the redistribution of power that enables the have-not citizens, presently excluded from the political and economic processes, to be deliberately included in the future” (Arnstein 1969, 216). Following this definition, Arnstein graded participatory processes in eight “steps”, whereby higher steps represent the progressive redistribution of power and a rise in self-empowerment (Figure 1). The lowest segment of the ladder towards power redistribution denotes masquerades of participatory action; an intermediate segment encompasses communities with a limited voice in planning decisions; and a higher level of participation entails increasing degrees of community decision-making. Arnstein linked such processes to examples of planning practice: non-participatory “therapies” occur in public housing programmes when public institutions bring tenants together to help them “adjust their values and attitudes to those of the larger society”; tokenistic “consultation” in attitude surveys becomes window-dressing participation if not combined with more substantive forms of participation (p. 219); and citizen-delegated power entails giving a majority of seats to citizens in the decision-making process of a particular program (p. 222).

Figure 1. Eight rungs on a ladder of citizenship participation.

Source: Adapted from Arnstein (1969).

Arnstein’s characterization of citizen participation bridges planning practice with its ontological orientation towards social justice, and sheds light on the heteronomous relationships existing between stakeholders involved in municipal and regional transformations, as in the cases of slum upgrading in Belo Horizonte (Kapp and Baltazar 2012), post-disaster planning in Haiti (Contreras 2019) or high-speed rail network planning in the UK (Phillips 2017). However, such framework has not been explicitly put at use at the scale of urban design interventions. Doing so would require to further learn how participatory design practices target specific problems such as scarcity and inequality, as well as how the projects' social and spatial contexts influence the potential reach of participatory strategies. Conceptualizing diverse discourses about participation is particularly critical in informally constructed areas, where various actors involved in building and rebuilding processes such as neighbour communities, funding institutions, private landlords, mediating advocacy groups and sometimes crime organizations, follow a complex evolutionary trajectory. It is also crucial in such contexts to gain a critical understanding of commonly used spatial terms like “slum” (Gilbert 2007; Harris 2018), “self-help” (Ward 1978) mutual-help (Burgess 1977), as well as upgrading (McTarnaghan 2015; Pimentel Walker 2016; Stiphany, Ward, and Perez 2022).

3. Data and Methods

This study uses discourse analysis in two case studies of mutual-help housing projects: the incremental housing project in Quinta Monroy (Iquique, Chile), which accommodated 93 families living in a centrally located campamento in 2004; and the self-managed housing project União da Juta, which housed 160 families in São Paulo’s Sapopemba District (Brazil). These cases display two paradigmatic approaches to participation in urban design as either tools that facilitate the resolution of specific housing problems, or as part of a wider transformation of society, according to Massidda (2017). They are also among the handful of extensively documented mutual-help housing projects whose discourse can be comprehensively analysed, and which are predicated upon similar programmes, scales, dates of construction and region.

Within the diverse range of approaches to discourse analysis that exist within the social sciences (Tannen, Hamilton, and Schiffrin 2015; Wodak and Meyer 2015) we use a critical discourse approach that focuses on rendering power inequality visible (Van Dijk 2015, 466; Wodak and Meyer 2015, 4) and thus intrinsically aligns with Arnstein’s characterization of citizen participation. Critical discourse analysis has been used in the context of policy-oriented housing research (Hastings 2000; Marston 2002) and of the spatial analysis of housing projects (Hidalgo Dattwyler, Santana Rivas, and Link 2019). Keating (2015) and especially Richardson (1996, 2002) argue for the use of discourse theory in spatial disciplines, particularly as it helps to analyse “how discourses and strategies of inclusion and exclusion are connected with particular spaces [to] reinforce certain ways of thinking” (Richardson 2002, 359). Yet the critical approach to discourse analysis, taken in this paper at the level of housing interventions, requires two methodological clarifications. First, to identify how urban designers use participation as a discourse we choose to analyse a corpus of articles, book chapters and monographs written in English, Spanish and Portuguese. We acknowledge that this method gives preference to the perspective of urban designers as experts over the perspective of marginalized persons (Van Dijk 2015, 478) and provides limited knowledge about the conditions under which these texts were produced (Wodak and Meyer 2015, 21). We consider yet such documentary analysis valid since we analyse the consistency of discourse, and not the consistency of mutual-help projects themselves – which would have required direct empirical observations. Second, we understand urban design arguments as loose, multimodal, and narrative storylines (Hajer 1997; Jancsary, Höllerer, and Meyer 2016) made by texts and images appearing in urban design articles and monographs with the aim at persuading an audience.

Based on the abovementioned preconditions, our critical discourse approach to analyse each case study follows a three-tier process. For each case, we first describe the pre-existing socio-spatial context and policy environment. Second, we describe the project features that are explicitly linked to participatory strategies, by analysing the genre and content of selected publications written by both external academic experts and the urban design offices involved. As a rationale to describe the strategies we adopt a problem-solving meta-narrative differentiating pre-existing problems, socio-spatial principles conceptually addressing the problems, socio-spatial actions carried during projects’ construction, and outcomes arisen after construction. Third, we position experts’ arguments in the context of Arnstein’s framework by unpacking latent problem-solving narratives that explain how participation in each case relates to power redistribution. In the discussion chapter, we describe the degree to which each project tailors their participatory method to their respective socio-spatial contexts.

4. Participation in Quinta Monroy’s Incremental Housing Project

4.1. Socio-Spatial Context

Quinta Monroy is a residential development that in 2004 settled 93 families in a consolidated urban area in Iquique (Chile) they had already occupied with precarious housing. The project constructed basic infrastructure, open spaces and core housing units (with kitchen, bathroom and living room) that were expanded by families themselves (Figure 2). The project responded to the precarious conditions existing in informal settlements, which in Chile have received different denominations according to their historical inception; currently, campamentos are officially designated as illegally occupied urban areas with dwellings lacking drinking water, electricity or sewage (De Ramón 1990). The population living in campamentos in Chile has increased in the last decades: while in 2004 they housed approximately 27.000 families (with five campamentos in the entire region of Tarapacá, where Iquique is located), in 2022 the number raised to more than 113.000 families (with 11 campamentos in Iquique alone) (Moncada Diaz and Fuentes Gutierrez 2023).

Figure 2. Quinta Monroy incremental housing project: view in 2006 (left) and site plan (right).

Sources: Cristobal Palma/Estudio Palma (left); adapted from Elemental (right).

To reduce the population living in campamentos, various Chilean government agencies have developed housing programmes based in mutual-help since the mid-20^th century, especially with the programme Chile Barrio since the late 1990s (Greene 2014). Since the 1980s most programmes have provided financial vouchers for end users to subsidize the purchase, construction and upgrading of homes. Given the challenge for low-income earners to repay construction credits, in 2002 the Chilean government initiated the VSDsD programme (Vivienda Social Dinámica sin Deuda, or “No-debt Dynamic Social Housing” in English) as part of Chile Barrio, to provide subsidies for dwellers without a home for the construction of 25 sq.m. of housing that could expand to 50 sq.m. through self-help (Arriagada Luco 2004). The Chilean do-tank Elemental, which designed the incremental housing project in Iquique, used and adapted the conditions of the VSDsD programme to re-accommodate the families already living in the Quinta Monroy site into their upgraded settlement (O’Brien et al. 2020).

4.2. Expert Discourse

Since its completion in 2004, the Quinta Monroy project has been widely praised in news outlets and architectural magazines due to the aesthetic, economic and social appeal of its core units, called “half-homes”, which were expanded by dwellers themselves. The project contributed to the international reputation of Elemental and led Alejandro Aravena, one of its co-founders, to win the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture and the Venice Architecture Biennale Silver Lion award in 2008. Research studies about the half-houses in this period were generally positive about their spatial flexibility (Malatesta 2006), even when some held sceptic views about the future quality of common spaces and building expansions (de Arce and de Ferrari 2010). Nevertheless, the interest in the project sparked in 2016, when Aravena became the curator of the Venice Architecture Biennale and received the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize. Its jury praised Elemental’s “half of a good house” for raising residents “up to a middle-class standard of living” and for giving them “a sense of accomplishment and personal investment” (Pritzker Architecture Prize 2016), a praise echoed by international news media commending Aravena for “giv[ing] power to the people” (Bozikovic 2016) or “rebuilding a country” (Kimmelman 2016). The increasing reputation of Elemental also put the Quinta Monroy project in the spotlight of mainstream urban studies research, which has since largely raised points of criticism. While some conceptual contributions have understood Elemental’s approach to housing as a corollary to neoliberal urban development logics (Boano and Perucich 2016; Massad 2017), ex-post evaluations have described the emergence of new self-built dwelling extensions that exceed the footprint suggested by Elemental, as well as the deterioration of both public spaces and dwellings conditions, especially ventilation and overcrowding (Carrasco and O’Brien 2021; Millones Segovia 2017; O’Brien et al. 2020).

While Elemental has presented Quinta Monroy in several media formats (Aravena 2011, 2014), a central text describing the project in depth can be considered the 90-page chapter within the monograph “Elemental: Incremental Housing and Participatory Design Manual” (Aravena and Iacobelli 2012), presenting Quinta Monroy as Elemental’s first “pilot project”. The bilingual Spanish/English book, published by Hatje Kantz for a global architectural audience engaged in social and spatial innovation, contextualizes the problems of Quinta Monroy as the coupling of the global challenge of informal settlements and the unsuitable standard solutions that architects and public institutions offer to them (Aravena and Iacobelli 2012, 26–27; note: all following quotes in the current section are from this publication). Quinta Monroy is mainly portrayed as an inner-city slum with deficient building construction and illegal and unsafe subdivisions stemming from poverty. The office explains that 60% of housing spaces at Quinta Monroy had no light, direct ventilation, water or sewer connections, were overcrowded and also constructed with refuse materials (p. 87). This characterization of settlement problems, where material deprivation is the root cause of health and social problems, is close to the operational definition of slums established by UN (2003). Under this perspective, the spatial structure of informal housing enables or at least supports the social problems arising in Quinta Monroy, as the social affliction of “crime and drug trafficking,” for example, is seen as “facilitated” by the spatial problem of “overcrowding” and “labyrinth-like compounds”.

In addition to the global challenge of informal settlements, Elemental identifies a problem in the standard public policy approach to slum upgrading, namely the construction of high-rise social housing blocks in peripheral areas. Despite the large budgets devoted to provide new infrastructure for such projects, their marginalized location downgrades their financial value, which for Elemental is an indicator to assess the success of urban development interventions. Standard social housing is considered thus a disinvestment for both public authorities as well as for dwelling owners, all of which underlines the likelihood that poor families will remain in poverty despite having access to public housing (p. 98). Other building typologies such as detached houses or two-story row houses are regarded as encouraging informal additions, overcrowding or displacement, or as being too expensive for public subsidies to cover construction costs (pp. 91–92).

To overcome these pre-existing challenges Elemental foresees the design of feasible core housing units (called “half-good homes”) in consolidated city areas. Half-good houses have spatial qualities that can reduce overcrowding and provide suitable light and direct ventilation due to their low dwelling density (p. 98); they are also economical to construct (p. 104), and have the potential to grow and develop harmoniously over time (p. 103). Since the construction of the first half of the houses was carried out by formal construction workers, community participation within Quinta Monroy has to be understood in the context of design decisions that took place before construction, and of construction decisions linked to the second half of the houses. Elemental argues that three principles for participation were taken because the Chile Barrio Programme “stipulated that the project had to be developed with the participation of the community” (p. 106):

1. ”Communication of restrictions: instead of simply asking the families how they would like their homes to be, we thought [it] was professionally responsible […] to communicate the framework of restrictions that limited their options […]. We were very transparent and tried from the beginning to make them an active part of the project instead of the mere receivers of benefits.

2. Joint decisions: […] We were interested in the families making the key decisions. […] In the context of social housing, to prefer one thing means that one must necessarily sacrifice something else. We understood residents’ participation as a process in which the families took on the role of associates, establishing priorities of what was crucial and what could be done later, with all the rights and duties that collaboration implies.

3. Bi-directional participation: this means that information and communication didn’t have to flow only from top down.”

To implement these principles Elemental carried out workshops (see Table 1) and voting events. The workshops were described as mainly informational and educational, allowing the office to communicate their frame of action both during the temporary relocation of residents before construction as well as during the construction phase, when Elemental carried out a number of guided tours of the site and explained the characteristics of the project at real scale (pp. 124–132). Additionally, Elemental established a voting mechanism for residents to approve the typological building scheme proposed by the office (p. 102); to choose between constructing well-built structural systems or an additional bedroom partition (p. 110); and to choose between purchasing land to stay in a good location or individual water heaters (p. 111). Apart from these specific issues, residents also communicated their own preferences for courtyard size and form (p. 106).

Table 1. Description of workshops carried out by elemental during the construction phase of the Quinta Monroy housing project.

Name	Description
Initial	Explained the scope of Elemental’s architectural-technical assistance to the community Designated organizations and leaders to mediate with dissident groups that resisted being moved
Expansion	Explained the factors influencing the rising value of houses and how to take advantage of it
Façade	Conveyed the idea that the building was an organiser of internal diversity and should maintain some external homogeneity
Minga	Organised a group activity where residents symbolically took ownership of public space
Collective Space	Raised awareness of different responsibilities, rights and obligations of future residents with the intention to replace the operational mindset of residents from being squatters to being citizens

Source: own elaboration based on Aravena and Iacobelli (2012).

Elemental reported that after the construction of the half-good houses, the dwellers swiftly and properly constructed the second half of their homes. Two months after occupation, almost 60 percent of the expansions had been successfully executed from a technical standpoint (p. 126). While the first half (comprising 36 sq.m.) of each apartment cost US$7,500, the second half (of equivalent size) cost an average of US$1,000. Since the market value of the homes 1 year after construction was gauged around US$20,000 (p. 106), the value of houses more than doubled in 1 year. The visually harmonious condition of the scheme and construction was, furthermore, confirmed in the book chapter by 18 house plans and sections, 41 photographs of the project after completion, as well as 24 photographs and drawings portraying the participation of dwellers in group activities.

4.3. Latent Discourse

Embedded in Elemental’s discourse for the Quinta Monroy project we identify an approach espousing social advancement and greater household wealth by which the acquisition of good homes both helps residents to become middle-class citizens and leads to social advancement. In such meritocratic vision scarcity can be understood as the main underlying problem experienced by informal dwellers, while the solution can be identified as social housing buildings that simultaneously increase their public health and their financial wealth, both of which ultimately help “squatters” to become “citizens”. Harmoniously shaped spaces may additionally have an educational role in preventing chaotic behaviours as Elemental suggests that they prevent situations like uncontrolled building expansions and open space occupations.

Given Elemental’s focus on the physical construction of an urban typology, central to their discourse on participation is the allocation of power required for individuals to produce their second-half house, rather than the redistribution of decision-making power between institutions, experts, and dwellers. Within this perspective, participatory events aimed to channel the capacity of slum dwellers to develop or construct the second half of the dwellings, as well as to guide them to accept already-set plans and tasks (referred to as “constraints” by Elemental) required to achieve a relatively predefined typology. The relative resemblance of various incremental housing projects developed by Elemental is consistent with such interpretation, and aligns with the understanding of participation outlined by Alejandro Aravena in a TED talk presentation entitled “My architectural philosophy? Bring people to the process” (2014):

We decided to include the families in the process of understanding the constraints; and we started a participatory design process. […] The conclusion with the families – and this is important, not our conclusion, but the conclusion with the families – was that we had a problem; we had to innovate. [Afterwards] we went back to the families to do two things: join forces and split tasks. […] So [the] answer to the [precarious housing] menace is to channel people’s own building capacity. We won’t solve the [precarious housing] menace unless we use people’s own power for building.

Community participation in Quinta Monroy certainly helped neighbours to formally take decisions and thus produced positive impacts. Yet while residents were given a voice through voting and the celebration of workshops, they only had a limited capacity to define social and spatial aspects of the intervention. On the one hand, workshop meetings were described as largely functioning to communicate restrictions, educate citizens and ensure “consistency of project decisions” – which in themselves are informative, educational and therapeutic forms of participation. On the other hand voting between strictly binary and sometimes dire alternatives (a good building structure versus an extra bedroom; paying for the land plot versus paying for a water heater) represents the simulation of a partnership in which dwellers do not set goals and cannot contribute to a jointly designed plan. Instead, these reinforce the idea that experts behave as rational and efficient actors but need the consent of dwellers – which is a lower form of citizen participation. The lack of descriptions about residents’ own conceptual ideas to resolve the abovementioned trade-offs reinforces the narrative of the project as focusing on the material production of homes – it remains unclear, for example, whether these meetings were open either to disagreement or to integrating the needs, experiences, knowledge and visions expressed by families. In this sense, the explicit references to the “partnership” and the “bi-directional participation” between Elemental and their “associates” (i.e. the residents) can only relate to tokenistic forms of participation within Arnstein’s framework.

5. Participation in the Self-Managed Housing Project “União da Juta”

5.1. Socio-Spatial Context

Constructed between 1992 and 1998, the self-managed vertical housing project of União da Juta in São Paulo’s Sapopemba district provided dwellings, common outdoor areas, a bakery and a kindergarten for 160 families in a lot that dwellers occupied shortly before the construction process began (Figure 3). Before that, União da Juta’s dwellers had resided in precarious urban areas, which in São Paulo’s are home to 30% of its population (Barda 2011, 10); however, this figure varies according to the historical characterization of precarious areas given by different institutions as either loteamentos irregulares, cortiços, aglomerados subnormais or favelas (de Castro, Sikder, and Pedro 2022). The majority of São Paulo’s population in favelas live in peripheral urban regions like Sapopemba, which experiences acute infrastructure deficits as well as social marginalization. Such conditions led in the last decades to the rise of crime organizations as a major factor shaping urban transformations in precarious areas (Biderman et al. 2019; Rebello 2020); in the Sapopemba district the current ruling organization is the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital, or “First Metropolitan Command” in English), the largest crime organization of Brazil originating in 1992 in São Paulo (Feltran 2010).

Figure 3. União da Juta’s housing project: aerial view (left) and site plan (right).

Source: Nelson Kon (left); and adapted from USINA CTAH (right).

To address the needs of the Brazilian population living in precarious conditions, Brazilian rural workers created the popular Brazilian housing movement Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST) in the 1980s, in the context of a broader urban reform movement that lead to the creation of the Statute of the City in 1989 (Fernandes 2011; Stiphany 2019). Especially since then, housing policies in Brazil promoted popular participation in urbanization processes as part of a broader social struggle to co-manage urban land. Such processes tied land use regulations to incentives for self-management (autogestão in Portuguese), mutual housing (mutirão autogerido in Portuguese), participatory councils and housing movements (Bonduki 1996; Friendly 2017). The Statute of the City prescribed state legislative bodies with potential ways in which urban design offices could provide technical assistance to housing movements in the pursuit of mutual-help housing developments. The urban design office USINA CTAH (Centro de trabalhos do ambiente habitado, or “Work Center of the Inhabited Environment” in English) used the provisions included in the Brazilian Statute of the City to enforce the donation of land under jurisdiction of CDHU (Companhia de Desenvolvimento Habitacional e Urbano do Estado de São Paulo, or “Housing and Urban Development Company of São Paulo State”, in English) to MST members, and to provide funding for the self-managed housing project in União da Juta project.

5.2. Expert Discourse

Since the project was completed in 1998, União da Juta has been a landmark project of USINA, whose orientation to serve the poor originates from the Arquitetura Nova movement in Brazil in the 1960s (Arantes 2002; Grossman 2016). Since its inception in 1990 USINA has gained international recognition for its involvement in housing cooperatives and social movements (World Habitat 2007) for assisting “working peoples in the mobilization of public financing”, and for their attempt to “reverse the ‘logic of capital’ to produce a built environment that is more equitable and just” (Curry 2017). While its work is largely unknown in mainstream urban design culture, urban scholars aligned with a critical urban theory orientation have highlighted some of USINA’s contributions. Rizek et al. (2003) has described the functioning of the bakery and kindergarten in União da Juta as exemplary of mutual-help housing, while the ex-post evaluation of Nakashigue (2008) has highlighted the relative satisfaction of its dwellers after the projects’ completion. More recently, USINA’s critical approach to mutual-help housing has been broadly associated with counter-land grabbing movements (Irazábal 2018), and as a revolutionary form of architectural practice redefining its political, social and economic agency (Amaral 2020). Criticism of USINA’s projects have however appeared within the broader critique of the underpaid construction work carried by mutual-help housing dwellers, which fuels a professional construction and real estate sector for middle upper classes detached from the construction sector created for low-income earners (Oliveira 2006). At the same time, it is recognized that the labour-intensive construction carried out through the years by future dwellers of mutual-help housing has a personal cost (Nakashigue 2008).

To celebrate its 25^th anniversary, USINA carried out a crowdfunding project to share conceptual reflections and lessons learnt from its most important projects with an audience aligned with the work of social and housing movements in Brazil. As a result, USINA’s members co-edited an open access book published in Portuguese by the independent publishing house Ediçoes Aurora (Ferro et al. 2015). Two chapters of the book are devoted to describe reflections and practical information about União da Juta (Barros and Miagusko 2015; Usina 2015; note: all following quotes in the current section belong to these two book sections with; Ferro et al. 2015). In their book, USINA contextualizes precarious housing as a problem rooted in the inaction of public institutions to address powerlessness and inequality. Such inaction produces the commodification and speculation of mass social housing by which on the one hand real estate developers keep properties lying vacant in speculative areas, while on the other hand residents most in need cannot access public housing funds. These two problems have a marked spatial manifestation in peripheral regions, like the district of Sapopemba, where large sections of Brazil’s population suffer the burden of scant basic public service provision such as nurseries, schools, and hospitals (p. 40). This translates into low levels of equality, human development, and quality of life, which together have turned Sapopemba into one of the city’s most violent districts (p. 37).

To overcome these challenges USINA proposes the establishment of new fundamental patterns of sociability and solidarity through the construction of autonomous communities (p. 37). USINA understands the construction of self-managed housing as a spatial medium allowing residents to navigate social conflicts, from the provision of shared facilities to conflicts among neighbours themselves, and ultimately serving the political process of social emancipation (pp. 155–165). To this purpose USINA delegates project decisions and the resolution of conflicts to choices provided through direct democracy (i.e. through public and individual joint voting of USINA and residents) in assambleias (assemblies, in English); USINA, in this sense, decides to act “as a subordinate agent of a neighbor group” (p. 158). Additionally, its technical expertise in architecture, planning and construction are used during the design and construction phases of projects to provide technical assistance to the residents that make part of the building construction workforce.

In União da Juta the implementation of these principles took place both before and during the construction process. Before the acquisition of the project site and the building permits USINA helped the association to apply for public funds for its construction, occupied the vacant land where the project was to be located together with the neighbourhood association, and began the construction of a headquarters and common areas. The neighbours appointed a secretary in charge of coordinating the construction work as well as a neighbourhood coordination team tasked with establishing non-predatory relationships between neighbours themselves. A priority in this phase was placed on participation in political activities such as demonstrations in front of the municipality to support the association in acquiring building permits and funding (p. 47). Once the public funds for the União da Juta project had been acquired (p. 256), the neighbours’ association became a landowner and some of the 160 families involved in the project became construction workers. USINA, who was then hired by the association, managed the construction process including the hiring of workers, the provision of technical plans and alternatives, and the support to construction development including safety, economy, and management activities. Furthermore, USINA acted as a mediator between residents and the municipality, which gave partial funding for a nursery that the residents subsequently decided to build.

During the construction phase, the participatory structure organized between the residents and with USINA served to steer the construction of the 20 residential blocks – each with four floors – as well as to resolve social conflicts that arose. The neighbourhood coordination had on the one hand to balance the needs and demands of weekday and weekend construction workers, given that workers had irregular income and lived in different areas. USINA on the other hand moderated four major social conflicts between the neighbours. First, the residents had to respond to the request of a nearby squatted public building associated with drug trafficking to access water and electricity. After a meeting of the complete assembly of União da Juta neighbours, they denied access for fear of being prosecuted by the public authorities; the squatters did not complain, which reinforced the value of the organized neighbourhood (p.49). Second, as there was no nearby bakery, the residents decided to build their own community bakery, which would also provide income and skills for adolescents at risk of becoming involved in drug trafficking (p. 57). While USINA developed the plans and organized the construction, residents agreed to fund the building of the bakery instead of other discussed activities. Third, residents also suggested USINA to build a nursery in order to reconcile the work and family needs of many. USINA developed the architectural project and applied for public funds to subsidize the maintenance costs. At the same time, neighbours discussed whether to allow squatters’ children into the nursery, finally deciding to accept them. Fourth, neighbours and USINA together clarified which individuals were diverting money (p. 46).

While the success of União da Juta can implicitly be read through the completion and permanent occupation of the building (pp. 256–265), a proof of success of the project can be understood as the capacity acquired by the neighbours’ association to address challenges collectively. An example of the functioning of the assembly after the occupation of the building mentioned by USINA is the coordination and enforcement of actions to ensure that individuals do not take advantage of empty open areas to set up their own businesses after moving into the building (p. 53).

5.3. Latent Discourse

USINA’s focus on political autonomy as a response to the inaction of the State leads to a political understanding of participation that supports collective action. In this context, the housing project of União da Juta may be seen as a seed possibility to establish strong collective bonds whereby healthy autonomous communities can grow. Spatial development within this perspective may be understood as a medium to channel conflict resolution. More specifically, the governance established between neighbours to negotiate conflicts, both before and during the construction process, could be seen as anticipating the forms of urban governance that they would maintain once the project was concluded. Since the spatial problems derived from the construction of the housing project were seen as subordinate to the resolution of social conflicts, the description of USINA’s technical assistance focused on the mediation between residents themselves and with public institutions. Participatory processes, in this context, were rooted in the knowledge of the needs and wishes of the neighbours regarding typological and social considerations, and strove to build consensus through the development of internal negotiations in which neighbours’ decisions carried weight; and it sought cooperative rather than dependent relations with other groups and institutions. As a result of these priorities, USINA voluntarily delegated its decision-making power to lever the collective voice of neighbours, which can be considered a participatory process enabling citizen control according to Arnstein’s characterization.

The strong social discourse associated to participation in USINA’s project justifies the little role it gives to describe both the spatial features of União da Juta and the literal participation of dwellers in the construction of the housing project, even when external experts have acknowledged USINA’s construction techniques for multi-story collective housing buildings with low-skilled labour as architectural innovations. The sparse visual description of these spatial and formal features reinforces the idea that the core participatory aspects of the project were the social processes it enabled – i.e. the negotiation of conflicts between architects, politicians, citizens and residents, which required a degree of power-sharing – and that their participatory design methods can be described as a process but not be visible as a project outcome.

6. Discourses, Contexts and Representations of Participation

The analysis of the case studies in Iquique and Sapopemba shows how the discourses of participation in mutual-help housing projects target specific social problems and, at the same time, are conditioned by their specific socio-spatial contexts. The incremental housing project in Quinta Monroy aimed at overcoming poverty through a typology-oriented design proposal where a combination of formal and self-help housing targeted the precarious housing challenges typical of informal settlements. While Elemental makes explicit use of the concepts of participation and social advancement in their description of the project, its interpretation of power focuses on the residents’ “power to build” as well as on their increased purchasing power after the projects’ completion. The superiority of experts over residents to take decisions related to building activities and management in Quinta Monroy can be considered analogous to a client–provider relationship implicitly supported by the financial voucher system broadly used by the Chilean government. Such support fosters a formal construction sector composed by architectural practices that do not have strong resources for conflict resolution and neighbours whose interests are broken down into the interests of household units. These preconditions promote a form of participatory design that aligns with the rear ladder of participation under Arnstein’s framework, and that limits its innovative character to spatial alternatives for peripheral vertical housing.

In the case of União da Juta, USINA responded to the inaction of the state against the increasing commodification of social housing through a participatory process that empowered residents to self-govern themselves in social conflicts during and after the project completion. While União da Juta’s neighbours actively participated in the material construction of their multi-story housing project, USINA emphasized the value of their collective actions as a precondition for neighbours to manage internal conflicts, and as a medium to preserve their decision-making structure after the completion of the housing project. The self-managed housing project in Sapopemba is enabled, at the same time, by the Brazilian Statute of the City, which had opened the possibility for neighbours’ associations and technical assistance offices to work together in publicly sanctioned mutual-help housing programmes in vacant peripheral lands. The organizational structure of the MST social movement and its alignment to USINA’s values and expertise can be considered pre-existing resources that allowed residents to negotiate conflicts, build community, and gain autonomy. These social processes and agencies, which had been building for decades, could be seen as necessary prerequisites to promote the full participation of neighbours in the housing project under Arnstein’s framework.

The differences outlined by the case studies make clear that participatory design strategies carry specific core discourses and normative orientations – whether related to the reduction of material poverty or to the promotion of social justice. They also show that urban design offices conceive participatory strategies in the context of specific policy, social and spatial constraints. The ambiguous relationship between power redistribution and participatory design in mainstream urban design publications calls for a closer examination of their arguments in support of participation. While the proof for participation in mainstream urban design culture largely relies on visually oriented project and process descriptions, the stronger evidence of power redistribution requires a better understanding of the procedural aspects of participation – i.e. understanding the needs and aims of residents, as well as their present and ideal stakeholder and power relations. From this perspective, textual or diagrammatic qualitative representations of social processes can help practitioners involved in housing projects better portray how they gain legitimacy to speak for the interest of residents.

7. Conclusion

This paper described the interlinkages existing between the discourses and the contexts of participation in mutual-help housing projects. To do so we adapted Sherry Arnstein’s characterization of citizen participation to mutual-help housing interventions, and applied a critical discourse approach to the analysis of two renowned cases: the Quinta Monroy incremental housing project in Iquique (Chile) and the self-managed housing project in União da Juta, São Paulo (Brazil). The findings show clear differences in the way participation was enacted in each project. The incremental housing project in Iquique focused on the residents’ contribution to construction activities – a feature which both projects incorporated – while the project of União da Juta focused on the governance structure established between residents to negotiate conflicts. Given these focuses, the participation in Quinta Monroy’s project can be placed within the lower rungs of Arnstein’s framework, while participation in the project in União da Juta can be placed within its upper rungs. This divergence appears to be conditioned by the policies and socio-spatial contexts pre-existing the projects, which thus constrain what participatory strategies may be feasible. The findings call for urban design practices and researchers to scrutinize how typological innovations, self-help, and self-governance may address the needs and aims of underserved residents in housing projects. Additionally, they offer novel conceptual tools for urban scholars and practitioners to address the sustainability transformation of informal settlements.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Daniel Kozak for his support in the early steps of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.