Wash Ivanovic, G., Tamura, J., 2015.

Core-housing and collaborative architecture: Learning from Dandora

This paper introduces a case study which aims to record and reevaluate the current state of the emblematic sites-and-services project of Dandora, located in Nairobi, Kenya. Sites-and-services schemes are a well-known set of principles and steps aimed to provide housing to low-income people in developing countries. These projects were crucial in pioneering the inclusion of concepts like self-help and core-housing as an alternative to traditional social housing projects. Today, many of these projects are considered unsuccessful. They were actively revisited and reevaluated soon after their execution in the 70s and early 80s, and it is generally agreed that, because of many and complex reasons, sites-and-services projects had a number of shortcomings during their implementation. However, most of these reevaluations were done soon after the projects were implemented, and their consolidation process over the years has received little attention. For this case study, we revisited a specific area of Dandora which is regarded as the one with the best environmental quality by both local authorities and residents. We surveyed and recorded the actual state of the self-built houses and the resulted typologies, while also interviewing the current tenants. The analysis shows that the involvement of the tenants in the shaping of the Dandora project has reached unforeseen extents on both architectural and communal levels. Finally, the paper discusses the implications of these typologies and their possible applications in social housing and collaborative design.