Cities in a Changing World: Questions of Culture, Climate and Design AMPS | City Tech CUNY Page 52 INCREMENTAL HOUSING: A STRATEGY TO FACILITATE HOUSEHOLDS PARTICIPATION? Author: GORAN IVO MARINOVIC Affiliation: WENZHOU-KEAN UNIVERSITY, CHINA INTRODUCTION Incremental housing represents an open-ended housing platform which allows people to transform their habitable space through time. 1 This strategy is based on a progressive system where construction is incomplete but in conditions of habitability. 2 The households are encouraged to personalise their habitat by using micro-loans; moreover, this housing strategy includes the less privileged in the banking system by providing land tenure and promoting entrepreneurialism at a small scale. 3 It depends on a social policy that encourages households’ participation in using the subsidy as a leg-up into the private housing market so that residents can benefit from the capital gains. 4 The outcome of this participation is various dwelling forms dependent on the residents’ opportunities and challenges they are facing. 5 Incremental construction offers low-income households a means of affordable homeownership otherwise unavailable to them. This gradual building is also seen as the process by which low-income households make steady investments in housing as their income permits. 6 There are several steps in the process of incremental housing: connection to electricity/water supply to enable a de jure recognition, initiation of a project to demarcate plot perimeters, construction of the base house to enable a de facto recognition of tenure, “horizontal addition of extra rooms, and vertical extension of existing buildings.” 7 This building method depends on the community organisation based on families’ participation that is under continuous negotiation between members of incremental neighbourhoods. 8 Furthermore, it acknowledges the importance of a particular urban location, financing mechanism, design strategies and construction methods. 9 Predominant top-down decision making in Chilean incremental housing fails to meaningfully include marginalized groups, and thus it presents a hindrance to the success of the programme. Overwhelming evidence points out that marginalised groups are perceived as beneficiaries of social housing programmes rather than active parties in the decision-making processes “that influence resource distribution.” 10 In view of this, the study examines the impediments of self-building practices imposed on low-income families as a subject to criticism of the Chilean incremental housing programme. The hypothesis holds that occupants’ current adjustment issues acknowledge the consequences of top- down decision-making practices. The focus is on three consequences from atop planning and designing Lo Espejo social condominium (2007) and Las Higueras houses (2006) that correspondent