”The Vague Human” Settlements and their Sustainable Dwellings

CIVIS

SUSTAINABLE HOUSING

Text and images by Lorin NICULAE

Dwelling, Podu lui Galben, Prahova. You can see the different recovered enclosures of the house

This article was part, in a different form, of the author's doctoral dissertation, entitled Arhipera_participatory social architecture. In the doctoral thesis, the information referred to the community in extreme poverty in Ursărie, Balțești, jud. Prahova. In the present article, the information was verified in many other communities in extreme poverty, hence the general nature of the information presented.

The settlements in extreme poverty are, from the point of view of a "gravitational" determination, under the sign of vagueness. In what follows, I will attempt to structure the social, economic and cultural contingencies at work in the territory, determining the architecture of the dwelling from the site. I will give culture an open meaning, as a conceptual space in movement, evolution, transformation, rather than a fixed one, with quantifiable acquisitions (Rosaldo, 2001). Some considerations are also necessary regarding the observation of the cultural phenomena present in such settlements. Any visit by the research team to the territory is an event for the locals and an opportunity for information exchange. Any visit to a dwelling or even a simple stroll in the lanes is an interference on a spatial and interpersonal level. Moreover, once the dialog is established through interviews and open-ended questions, a one-to-one cultural exchange between the researcher and the locals takes place. To use an analogy from physics, the more the observation of a phenomenon focuses on fine, detailed elements at the quantum level, the greater the interference; basically, to observe a nucleon, we need to "hit" it with a beam of a certain wavelength, which will change its behavior. Similarly, when we challenge locals to conceptualize their needs, we can already speak of interference by giving them a conceptualizing grid. Conversely, their responses adjust the grid with new categories of specificity, forcing us to integrate "transformations in the course of experience" (Vattimo, Rovatti, 1998: 26-46).
Therefore, when I speak of the cultural identity of these settlements, I will not necessarily refer to a substantial, quantifiable identity that can be fitted into pre-established categories, but will opt for a processual, dynamic, multiple, and influenceable identity, an identity of belonging and open exchange (Appadurai, 2001). This is also because individual identity is vague as a form of census; many inhabitants of settlements in extreme poverty do not possess identity documents - identity cards and sometimes even birth certificates are missing. Because of illiteracy, some people do not know their age. I encountered the extreme case of a family with 8 children, where the mother did not know the names of all her children and, worse still, not all the children knew their names.

Dwelling, Podu lui Galben, Prahova. Dwelling made of clay, with unfinished wooden elements on the porch

This vague existence in relation to personal identity and the authorities is cumulatively transferred to housing identity: the ownership deeds of land and dwellings are often missing. Many plots are inherited informally, inheritances not being registered. Sales are done by hand deeds or, at best, only in the presence of witnesses. A common situation is when land is occupied without property rights, and this could only happen outside the locality or on the boundary of the intravilan. Others are in disputes which, due to the impossibility of paying all court fees, drag on for years.
Website
Regardless of their location in relation to the village or town (satellite or in the form of nuclei within the urban area), the disadvantaged housing areas (cf. Berescu) have several common characteristics. The first is topographical inferiority. These areas are either in flood-prone areas, or in valleys, or unconnected with the existing urban fabric, or close to landfills or sources of industrial pollution. When the settlement is located in a 'pit', the road to the heart of the village and its institutions (town hall, school, church) becomes a topographical and symbolic climb. In hierarchical terms, the site occupied by those living in extreme poverty is lower than that occupied by the majority population (even though in rural Romania, for example, 40% of the population live in poverty). Occupying late a disadvantaged site, a spatial "remnant", uninteresting for the inhabitants of the village, having a "weak" ritual, mythological and archetypal (Gaivoronschi, 2002, 49-52) foundation, disadvantaged communities have developed, during their existence, a civilization of the "remnant". In rural areas, poor settlements are to be found on the edge of the village, with a few households sprawling in the countryside, beyond the boundary, seen as a self-imposed limit by the village community (Liiceanu, 2005). This location was generated by the process of occupation of the land by poor families and accentuated by the material gap and cultural differences, causing exclusion and segregation over time.

Land parcels
While plots within the built-up area follow the street alignments, end in agricultural plots and are in close proximity to one another, the same cannot be said of the plots outside the built-up area in disadvantaged housing areas. It is unstructured, vernacular, without the slightest intention of systematization. There is no street grid or even streets, just areas that have been trampled by the wheels of carts or cars. Sometimes, the boundary between the alley and the plot is not obvious, as many of the plots have no fences. The explanation is simple, at least at first glance: when you are so poor that all your material possessions are scraps collected from the rubbish dump, when you have no animals in your yard and absolutely nothing susceptible to theft, then fencing is deprived of its defensive significance, that of providing a first line of protection against aggression. Two other meanings of fencing remain to be analyzed.
When it does not protect the site from external danger, real or virtual, the fence is used to enclose something that is either valuable but could escape (such as a barnyard animal) or dangerous and if it did escape, it would harm you. This is not the case in communities of extreme poverty, where farm animals are very rare (sometimes they are even kept indoors for protection).

Finally, the third meaning of enclosure, and perhaps the most important and fertile for the present study, is the symbolic meaning of the establishment and ritual separation of an organized space (kosmos) from an unorganized, unknown and therefore dangerous one (chaos). Any taking possession, whether of a city, a piece of land or a house, is accompanied by a ritual (Eliade, 1943) designed to localize the work on the axis mundi and to consecrate its boundaries. Similarly, by occupying a 'no-man's' land (only because it was so uninteresting that there was no one willing to appropriate it before), the man-founder in the deprived settlement area drew its boundaries to give it spatial meaning. In relation to the lack of possessions to be protected, the fence in the situation under analysis is maintained at the level of a symbolic boundary of a piece of land in relation to the endless and unorganized space outside, without, however, acting constrainingly by imposing an introversion of the inhabitant towards his dwelling but, on the contrary, maintaining an openness, a possibility of transformation which, as I will show below, has evolved towards a migration of public life at the level of the collectivity.

House annex, Cunești, jud. Călărași. Mix of materials at hand

Public space - Private space
The relation public space - private space is thus vague (Ioan; 1998, 56-58, 87-90), lacking precise contours, resulting in an extremely interesting feature of social life: migration. Indeed, where there are no clear boundaries between several plots, where land is unfenced, where there is no separation between the street and the courtyard, dwellings are constituted as monads, and the space between them forms a relational continuum in which public life unfolds, according to needs or circumstances, in one place or another, moving freely from one dwelling to another. An unbounded space plays the role of a medium for the propagation of social vectors, and this takes place decentralized, arrhythmic and free. In practice, we are dealing with a continuous and homogeneous space, a market, an agora in which houses are merely topographical landmarks. The nomadism of social life has its origins, of course, in the lack of hierarchy between families. If one of the families was wealthier, more affluent, more influential, with material possessions to protect, then the need for an enclosure would arise, a garden would appear. There are, it is true, rudimentary enclosures, but these, as we have seen, have a symbolic rather than an anti-burglary role, they are discontinuous, and the settlement can be traveled not on the road but through courtyards, without opening gates or jumping fences.
Having therefore no hierarchy at the symbolic or social level, the public space of the community is an amorphous, rhizomatic, multi-oriented space in which the only active vectors are social and economic. Moreover, as we have shown above, the distinction between public and private space is of little significance, which gives rise to a one-way reaction: on the one hand, the public space (the rudiment of the street) borrows private characters (a horse can be woven directly in the street, a partial and temporary enclosure can abusively occupy the street space, personal belongings can be stored in the street) and, on the other hand, the private space of the courtyard (open and merging with the street) borrows public characters of the market (this is where emergency meetings of the inhabitants, public announcements, etc.).
We have characterized the relationship between the public space of the street and the private space of the courtyard as vague, judging things through the prism of the Romanian rural specificity, where the distinction between the street and the yard is a "hard" one (according to the principle "whoever enters my yard perishes" which seems, at the present time, more and more valid and active, at least in the news). At this point, a moment of reflection and relativization of the problem is needed. Can we still speak of a dichotomy between the street and the courtyard in disadvantaged communities? In other words, is our criterion of looking at the street and the courtyard in terms of what separates them still operational? Does it still make sense to look for the center of the settlement, the square, when the homogeneous spatial continuum fulfills the function of the square? Wouldn't it be more useful to replace it with a street-court binomial or, more precisely, with a square-street-court trinomial that acts as a 'soft', 'weak' or 'vague' public space (or semi-private space, for that matter)? In the light of this judgment, and because this particularity, this local specificity, is assumed by the collectivity (no one is shielded by three-meter high opaque fences), we can classify the vague public space as one of the elements that can help define a spatial identity.

The unique characteristics of this continuous and homogeneous public space are given by its location and appropriateness in a site determined, physically non-repeatable, by local-regional specificity and by the isolated evolution of the community. Without maintaining socio-cultural exchanges with the village or with other localities, due to poverty and enclave, very poor communities have evolved autonomously and in isolation, and the typology of the settlement has been preserved over time. For this reason, the recent housing (few in number) that attempts to reproduce foreign models is at odds with the architecture of the place (although it is very difficult to define what gives identity to this architecture, I will see, in the analysis of the house, that it nevertheless possesses unique collective characteristics).
The recognizability of the public space derives precisely from the relationship between full and empty (at the urban level, between built volume and interstitial public space). From a spatial point of view, this ratio preponderates in favor of public space, especially in rural areas and for disadvantaged satellite settlements. Houses are small, low and isolated, with large plots of land. The image created is one of non-delimitation, non-determinism and freedom.
At the representative level, these relationships are not hierarchical; we cannot say that public space is more important than housing, since without housing, public space would not exist. Housing does not figure in the equation either: most of our time is spent in the social continuum determined (or undetermined, as we have seen) by public space. We can imagine the relationship between public space and homes as the relationship between neurons and dendrites, whose interweaving generates a homogeneously sensible texture. Continuing the analogy, we note the absence of axons, i.e. nerve filaments that communicate with the center. In fact, social life takes place in the public space, without converging at one point or another, and the settlement is cut off from the village where the town hall, the church and the school are located.
Courtyard
The households are also vague. The houses are oriented indifferently to the points of the compass, the important thing being the relationship with the access, which is very arbitrary. The outbuildings are scattered and are more in relation to the natural setting, taken as a support, than to the man-made. Thus, a hen-house benefits from its proximity to a supporting tree; its attachment to another outbuilding could, at most, result in double damage if one collapses on top of the other.

Since there is no tradition of community building, each household is an experiment which is adjusted from one year to the next according to the suitability it has shown over time. Thus, if a house, originally single-cell (for economic reasons), was built with an east-west oriented gable roof, and if, during its operation, users found that the north-facing gable had deteriorated significantly, when it was extended by adding a new cell, it would have the roof facing the opposite way.
Obviously, we cannot discuss the programmaticism of vernacular architecture par excellence. But we can, and indeed must, take into account the reality that no household construction is intended to serve any other purpose than to meet needs of an immediate nature that can be satisfied at one time or another, depending on the highly fluctuating financial capacity of families. The result is a formal and volumetric spatial diversity surpassed, perhaps, only by the ingenuity to resolve things in the simplest, cheapest and quickest way possible.
In the courtyard, in addition to the outbuildings, there are also small production workshops. Also in the courtyard are also the pits from which the earth, the raw material for the adobe bricks, is extracted. The yard is also the place where they dump the leftovers, the residues, the waste (very little, in fact, because most of the time people use the waste collected from the dumps for some other purpose). What's left over after using a piece of rubbish is, of course, less rubbish. In the anemic horse-drawn carriage, the wooden bench has been replaced by a car seat for comfort. Scattered around the courtyard are pieces of worn, broken, degraded furniture.
The house
Coming, finally, to the houses themselves, they reflect the typology of the vague both functionally and structurally, tectonically. Not all functions are represented, and one particularly absent is the bathroom (toilet), the physical needs being satisfied primarily around the house. The kitchen is also the bedroom, and the bedroom is the kitchen or living room, depending on the circumstances. This vague relationship to function implies a polyvalence of living spaces and a lack of rigorous specialization. Overcrowding caused by poverty is of course responsible for this state of affairs. The houses do not have the minimum equipment, such as refrigerators, so perishable foodstuffs cannot be stored during the summer.
Tectonically, buildings in general and houses in particular are vernacular and ephemeral. The works lack solidity, 'groundedness'. They generally 'float' on shallow foundations made of various materials, such as river rock agglomerated with beaten earth. The superstructure is often made of roughly hewn, roughly hewn timber. The walls are made of adobe or earth, while the roof is made of sheeting, reclaimed tiles, PVC foil, advertising banners or any other material that can stop the rain without being blown away by the wind. Analyzing the construction elements, we realize a constant, namely that any finished element of the house, structural or enclosure, has anthropometric dimensions and is light enough to be handled by one man. Indeed, when a family of 12 members lives in a two-family dwelling, eight of whom are children, two of whom are adults and two of whom are elderly, the responsibility for the dwelling falls on the shoulders of one of the adults, i.e. the one who is able to work or present when needed, irrespective of gender. By doing only the work or repairs that he can do himself, without tools and without being mechanized, the caretaker/builder builds the house according to his own strength. We can say that most of the construction elements weigh less than 30 kilograms. The pillars are made of wood with a maximum cross-section of 7x7cm or, rarely, 10x10cm, or even sturdier branches cleaned of branches, and the beams are made of the same. The joints, the knots are "soft", sometimes braided, sometimes unflexible washers made from improvised materials. The walls are made of adobe or earth taken from the courtyard itself (this creates potholes all around the house). Of course, the result of these building practices is a flimsy dwelling that needs capital repairs after every storm and every spring. But one identifying characteristic emerges: the absence of massiveness, the lightness of construction and sometimes even the elegance of the dwelling as a reflection of anthropomorphic proportions.

Another characteristic of the dwellings, this time in terms of the finite elements that make them up, is, paradoxically, prefabrication. Obviously, this cannot be programmed prefabrication in relation to a preliminary design. As we have seen in the houses under construction, many of the basic enclosures of the future dwelling, such as doors and windows, are salvaged from demolition sites, whether or not they have been reconditioned, and put in place. The result is a stylistic syncretism devoid of any decorative intent, even though the integrated elements, coming from old houses, are decorated in their own way, reflecting different eras and cultures. There is, however, a trend towards architectural decoration of houses, particularly on the interior, where ornnamnamentation, applied in the form of painting narrow horizontal and vertical registers forming anchorings, is likely to endure. On the outside, the houses are sometimes colored in shades of blue and green; on the inside, green, yellow and pink dominate.
In attempting to identify an architectural language for houses built in extreme poverty, we encountered the difficulty of discovering signifiers, i.e. constructed elements that would give an idea of the type of space, its nature and its symbolic charge. Among the few such signifieds that have been detected, the most representative is the porch, a semi-private and at the same time semi-public architectural element, which, as we saw earlier, makes the transition between the vague or "weak" public space of the courtyard and the threshold of the house. When the weather permits it, the porch is where much of the daytime activity takes place. The porch, a traditional element par excellence, undergoes a mutation here, transforming itself from a semi-private/private space into a semi-public/private space. The difference is subtle, subtle in nuance, but it very much particularizes the porch in terms of its use and the meaning attributed to it. Thus, the threshold of the house now takes on the full weight of the public-private separation and acquires greater representational value.
Conclusion
To sum up, we have observed a pluralism that is conscious at the plot level, where enclosures have a symbolic role; at the level of the relationship between public and private space, where we have detected a public continuum, a functional trinomial of square-street-courtyard; finally, at the architectural level, where anthropometry plays a significant role in the dimensioning of dwellings and their actual execution, and where flexibility and vernacular make up for the lack of specialized spaces.
Sustainability means, in this context, not so much a programmatic thinking about the planet's resources and their conservation for the future, but the production of housing/housing through low-tech, recycling and up-cycling. As I mentioned at the beginning of the text, the analyzed culture is open, mobile, processual, exchange, open to new acquisitions and, above all, capable of integrating patterns. This is why I believe that, within the framework of national programs for the revitalization of underprivileged built heritage that will have to be carried out in the not too distant future, sustainable building models put into practice through the direct participation of beneficiaries should be preferred to the current mainstream techniques of mass housing production.

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