Re-thinking Elemental’s incremental housing: Residential Satisfaction and resident-driven adaptations in Villa Verde, Chile

Abstract

The Elemental architecture studio designed Villa Verde, one of the world’s most iconic incremental housing projects. Villa Verde was initiated to house residents of the city of Constitución in southern Chile under a participative framework. The aim was to encourage the residents to complete the “other half” of the “core” houses supplied by the developer, self-managing a process of housing modification and extensions to suit their needs and aspirations. This paper analyzes the residents’ perceptions and the incremental additions to the ‘half-houses’ built in the four years since the occupation and identifies the factors that influenced these adaptations. The analysis focuses on the relationship between the changing residents’ satisfaction levels and the subsequent housing adaptations. This study demonstrates that residents' self-managed housing adaptations were performed according to financial capacities and individual aspirations with more than half of them built beyond the design limits. The self-help constructions followed a variety of formal and informal patterns demonstrating that the incremental process had an initial momentum that decreased as the residents’ needs were covered, but it is likely to continue and take on unpredictable and more complex forms that could impact the neighborhood management, inclusive governance, and financing of future adaptations.