Jardim Lapena Social Housing Proposal by Apparatus Architects and Alvaro Arancibia (2023). (Courtesy Tide Setubal Foundation and BlendLab +Lapena Habitar Program, São Paulo)
In 1995, São Paulo resident Carmen Silva was homeless. She was offered shelter in the far East Zone of the sprawling 12-million-person metropolis, but chose instead to be without a home in the resource-rich city center. If that’s how we were going to live, in such a remote location, she thought at the time, I’d rather stay on the streets downtown.
The idea of needing a home in an adequate location might sound obvious. It’s one of the seven concepts that define international law on the right to housing, according to the United Nations. But repeatedly, governments and developers in countries across the Americas build affordable housing in areas without access to the resources people need to live a full life.
“One hundred affordable housing units built!”, as a local politician might proclaim, does not serve resident needs if the homes are too far from jobs and social services or are on a polluted site. The same goes for homes missing any of the other six aspects of the right to housing: security of tenure, availability of services, accessibility, habitability, affordability, and cultural adequacy.
In collaboration with architects and others in her situation, mostly women of color, Silva created the Movimento Sem Teto do Centro (Downtown Homeless Movement, or MSTC). MSTC trained people in collective living and designed and opened its first occupation of a vacant building in 1997. Today, MSTC operates 10 occupations in downtown São Paulo.
Visiting 9 de Julho, MSTC’s landmark occupation, brought me the closest I’ve ever been to utopia. The site houses a productive garden, open spaces for gathering lined with colorful murals, affordable housing for 500 residents, on-site social services, and two giant, ground-floor kitchens, all collectively managed. Every Sunday, Cozinha Ocupação 9 de Julho—the building’s resident-run community kitchen—serves a meal to the public on the site’s grounds as “food to fuel the fight.”
9 de Julho offers one example of what the right to housing can look like in practice, and how homes embodying that right can change lives, especially for those who are most vulnerable. The right to housing—a cause allied with housing justice, the focus of my architectural work for more than 20 years—offers a holistic, human-centered approach that mirrors the qualities that any of us would seek in a home. But considering the right only as a legal and economic issue has failed, leaving billions of people around the world inadequately housed.
We must also address the right as an architectural concern. Only by fully considering the spatial and architectural dimensions of the right to housing, along with the economic and legal elements, can we fully meet the human needs of residents. Policy furthering any of the seven aspects of the right to housing is only as good as the architecture that materializes it.
In 2023, I started to wonder: What would happen if we brought together the knowledge and insights of grassroots leaders such as Silva from São Paulo with those of people like Leilani Farha, former U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing; Fabiana Tock, of Brazil’s Tide Setubal Foundation; Jorge Ambrosi, of Mexico City’s award-winning architecture firm Ambrosi Etchegaray; Dana Cuff, an architect who leads cityLAB UCLA; Rosa Aboy, head of the Center for Research on Housing History in Latin America; and Cea Weaver, the recently named head of the NYC Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants? I decided to find out.
The result: Architecture and the Right to Housing, a Pan-American program series convening 70 authorities on the subject, including those mentioned above. It is the first project of the Architecture and Housing Justice Lab, a hub I run at the University of Toronto for urbanists, architects, designers, and the public to join in the fight for housing justice. Taking place from 2023 to 2025 in Mexico City, Toronto, Buenos Aires, São Paulo, New York City, and Los Angeles, the gatherings allowed participants to share insights and debate what it could look like if the right to housing were realized in their city or country, and how architecture might contribute.
In each city, we partnered with a local expert to convene a public keynote lecture and a private, daylong roundtable. We designed each roundtable to be catalytic, gathering a diverse group of participants who had knowledge to share, and who could take new ideas and connections back into their important work.
Our organizing partners, including Proyector in Mexico City and cityLAB UCLA, helped to localize larger concepts—for instance, foregrounding the 70 percent of housing that is auto-constructed in Mexico, or the post-fire housing recovery in Los Angeles—and invited the right people to the table.
Excerpts from the roundtables will be published on Untapped’s website over the coming months, offering valuable insights and candid conversations for your consideration. The roundtable highlights also include key takeaways and case studies that illustrate how architecture can contribute to the right to housing.
Among them: Peterson Rich Office’s speculative Scalable Solutions for the New York City Housing Authority, for example, provides “habitability” for public housing residents who have suffered for too long under unhealthy living conditions. In Mexico, Ambrosi Etchegaray’s Construyes tu Casa platform offers interactive design advice for self-built housing, contributing to “affordability.”
In contrast to housing discussions focused on specific policy fights or architectural trends, our workshops challenged participants to work together to envision something more transformative. Our goal was for housing advocates to emerge with a better understanding of the existing and potential roles of architecture, and for architects and urban professionals to gain ideas on how to further the right to housing through their work.
In every city, participants approached me after the program with gratitude: They had never been at the table with potential collaborators from such a wide range of disciplines, or with so many compatriots with lived expertise.
Human rights–based struggles have a much longer history in Latin America than in the U.S. or Canada. At the same time, the concentration of resources in the northern countries propels forward housing innovation that can be shared. Through programs like the ones we recently convened, we are developing a Trans-American community of practice committed to working toward the realization of the right to housing, and to engaging architecture’s full capacity in contributing to that right.
Join us.