Building homes for people with a low income usually results in standard housing, with minimum room for variation and innovation. So whenever something special happens – which it often does – that takes place in the ‘left-over areas’ of such projects, as PhD researcher Mo Sedighi has discovered. He says that housing projects should always include unbuilt areas that occupants can use or finish as they see fit.

Sedighi made his discovery more or less by chance during his work as a housing architect. In one housing project, he had noticed that two parcels of land which had been left vacant had suddenly become the beating heart of the new neighbourhood. Residents used them for barbecues, parties and residents’ meetings. “Vacant areas that people design and finish themselves make people feel at home, part of the community,” he says. “The architecture designed by others apparently does not give them the space they need.”

He decided to take a closer look by holding five housing projects up to the light. His focus was modernist housing architecture for lower income groups in Iran, his country of origin. “Not because it is worse there than anywhere else, but because I know Iran the best,” he emphasises. How do people 'own’ their living environment, how do they turn it into pleasant places to live and how do they make it feel like home? The shocking conclusion was that this was more in spite of than thanks to the architecture.

Three to four million homes were built in Iran in the period from 1945 to 1980. They all qualify as ‘highly modernist’ architecture: functional, rational, simple and standardised. On the basis of his studies, Sedighi has identified various building patterns. That has led him to conclude that occupants want to have their own say, where possible, in what their living environment looks like. Does the modernist, industrialised design, which the Iranian government imposes, offer enough room for that? No, it's too rigid for that, he says. The Iranian architectural sector is therefore critical of the government because of its top-down housing policy. The other way around, policy-makers dismiss non-standard architectural views of housing as fantasy.

Social cohesion
In an Iranian archive, Sedighi found a final declaration from the 1970s drawn up after a large architecture congress in Shiraz-Persepolis. This contains a ‘Habitat Bill of Rights’. International architects set down in this declaration the conditions for architecture that create cohesion in modern society. One of those conditions concerns the possibility of allowing living spaces to grow and change.

In the years that followed, some Iranian architects put their words into action and created possibilities for building extra spaces on top of or next to their homes. Sometimes homes are completed partially unfinished, where residents can finish their living spaces using their own choice of local materials. In other projects, a variety of housing typologies are used or areas are left open between homes where neighbours can create something new together using their own two hands. Sedighi even encountered a project where occupants were allowed to design part of the façade. That creates diversity and recognisability. “Successful housing projects are precisely those where occupants are given the chance to use their own two hands or contribute their own ideas,” says Sedighi. “Those receive the highest scores and it is in these neighbourhoods that people stay for generations.”

The community of architects can learn something from this, finds the PhD researcher. Adding some variation is never impossible – even in affordable housing. “Complete standardisation is not a good thing; a one-size-fits-all approach does not benefit occupants. Architecture must accommodate various lifestyles and stages of life.”

To achieve that, designers need to step out of their architectural firms and talk to future occupants, he says. He himself has put his words into action: Sedighi recently started working for Dura Vermeer architects as a concept/project developer.

Published: January 2020

More information

• PhD defence Mo Sedighi