In Brazil, despite the recent massive estate housing operations mostly of the millions of internal migrants have failed to find adequate housing and ended up squatting or renting in settled informal areas. Likewise others countries of South America, in the Brazilian slums, the so-called favelas, the urban density is extremely high and the expansion of the houses compressed on the scopes is commonly made through the construction on the upper slab. These building works are self-help processes whenever the goal is to meet families needs regarding built areas to accommodate new family members, or; contracts featuring local contractors or workers, when the construction results from the selling of the building rights associated to the maximum utilization of the rooftop. These are process of verticalization often resulting in three, four or five and six-storey houses, built in seemingly hazardous techniques, with narrow superposed volumes. These operations express with remarkable clarity the concept of incremental housing (IH), not grounded in design, as delivered by acclaimed architects, such as Pritzker-winner Alejandro Aravena, rather in its most popular and pragmatic sense, instead. While the lack of housing raises to more than five millions of houses and almost on third of the inhabitants of the big cities lives in poor housing conditions IH became the prevailing solution for expanding homes and supplying affordable housing for low-income populations. The achievements of the self-help and aid-self help production in the existing housing stock, suggest that more attention should be paid to IH processes. Perhaps trying to learn from current and previous experiences, both formal and informal, and search for new methods and techniques to improve them. This framework brings us to the Brazilian involvement in past housing operations based on the idea of the embryo in which a house can grow according to the family interests and affordability. This research analysis the performance of the World Bank (WB) Site and Services Projects (SSP) conducted in Brazil in the eighties, taking as a case study a large resettlement operation carried out in favelas (3) of S.Paulo, Recife and S.Salvador. This triple action consisted of providing infrastructure, a plot and a core-housing unit to each family to enable the self-construction of their new dwellings. The aim is to understand how this operation has evolved through time, how communities have tackled risk, resilience and sustainability issues, and subsequently grown up. The research method relies on consultation in libraries and archives, such as archives of municipalities in Brazil and the WB in Washington DC, interaction with locals technicians, and fieldwork. The goal of the research is two-fold; firstly, to identify the social sustainability issues along the process of resettlement and IH, namely identifying stakeholders, their different roles and interactions Locally, the . Secondly, in a second stage, doing fieldwork, to survey selected families that received plots and core unities in the SS. Conclusions of the first stage stress the importance of the social networks that resulted from the SSP and IH process and qualify the interactions among the members of those networks. In particular, it is possible to highlight the role played by the local housing agencies COHAB and the municipalities who issued the building and permits.
Keywords: Incremental housing, World Bank Site and Service Projects, favela, informal settlement, slum upgrading, social sustainability
6b. Urban and rural development
