Negotiating the Formal and the Informal—Quinta Monroy's Critique of Modernist Housing

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“Has This Chilean Architect Figured Out How to Fix Slums?” This Mother Jones headline vocalized the halo that the architecture and urban planning communities crowned on the Quinta Monroy housing project.[1] Failures of previous modernist attempts to eradicate slums still fresh in mind, Quinta Monroy embodied a new understanding of informality that led to a different approach to addressing insecure settlements. Overthrowing the traditional technocratic solutions that prescribed dense, repetitive high rises, Quinta Monroy favored a participatory process in which the housing infrastructure was provided only in part, leaving room for future buildout that would be constructed by the residents. For a while, this solution was heralded as the modern day’s most holistic and equitable solution for housing insecurity, earning its architect, Alejandro Aravena, fame and accolades, among which was the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the single most prestigious recognition in the field. In the award citation, the Pritzker jury members wrote,

An understanding of the importance of the aspirations of the inhabitants and their active participation and investment in a project, as well as good design, have contributed to the creation of new opportunities for those from underprivileged backgrounds.”[2]

Studies of the neighborhood in the past seventeen years appear to attest the success of the project—of the 93 units, all but one had realized its expansionary capacity, patching Quinta Monroy into a colorful quit of structures that suited the needs of each individual household.[3] However, it hasn’t all been positive—criticism surfaced as weaknesses revealed themselves over time. Was Quinta Monroy the revolutionary critique that stood in radical opposition from its modernist precedents, or a tentative compromise in reaction to previous failures that nonetheless retained its modernist core?

I. Introduction

Quinta Monroy is an on-site slum upgrading housing project that, starting from a housing core, allows residents to build out the house over time. The backdrop for the project was one of increasing resources directed at slum upgrades with attention toward incorporating diverse stakeholders and addressing complementary social and economic challenges. At the same time, Quinta Monroy inspired many housing projects to be built in the same model. As the poster child for its kind and with sufficient time since construction for the resident-led developments to unfold, Quinta Monroy is the best proxy for glimpsing the makeup and outcomes of incremental housing development projects. This paper aims to understand the Quinta Monroy project by examining its circumstances, the details of its proposition, and its actual effects. Moreover, we study how it fits into a greater theoretical discourse on development—not only this project’s dialogue with previous projects, but also how the architecture discipline manifested various development theories into the buildings and cities. Although its designers and commentators preferred to see Quinta Monroy as a critique of the modernist approach of housing, this critique appears superficial, as (1) not able to fully appreciate the alternative, it clings to a modernist framework, rendering any allegiance to the alternative symbolic gestures at best, and (2) like modernist projects, its objective remain limited to the aesthetic and spatial realms, instead of widening its evaluation criterion to include more interdisciplinary goals. As such, the project suffered many of the same deficiencies as those that it set out to critique. To illustrate these points, this paper will begin by providing a background on Quinta Monroy and how this project approached the issue, then dive into an in-depth discussion of the theoretical landscape, and conclude by demonstrating the outcomes of the project and how it falls short of its ambitions of replacing modernism as the housing solution for poverty.

II. Background

a. Quinta Monroy: Origins of Need

Quinta Monroy is a 5,722 square meter (less than a city block) site located at the center of Iquique, a port city in Northern Chile. The successful saltpeter mining sector and growing economy in Iquique led to population booms that pressured the local housing market, forcing migrants and the marginalized to repurpose market gardens into informal settlements. Using recycled packaging materials scavenged from the local port, residents built temporary dwellings that only grew in density as the number of inhabitants doubled to 100 and plots were continuously subdivided. (Figures 1 and 1.5 show the rough arrangement of Quinta Monroy before the intervention.) The result was a settlement not only cramped, unsafe, unsanitary, and lacking in basic living infrastructure, but also one that posed significant risk to its neighbors in terms of fire hazards and crime rates.[4]

When the original landlord passed away, the residents of Quinta Monroy faced eviction. Luckily, the Chilean government was one that favored housing subsidization. Following the 1985 earthquake that devastated central Chile, the government increased its investment toward housing subsidy programs, especially toward families living under the poverty line, with the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism (MINVU) spending more than half of its budget on direct housing construction projects.[5] Specifically, a voucher of $10,000 was distributed for poor families to formally construct a house that they would own.[6] The residents of Quinta Monroy collective approached MINVU and obtained $10,000 per household for purchasing the land and upgrading the housing to formalize ownership. This amount would have sufficed for building a 30 square meter home, but the centrality of Quinta Monroy’s location meant $2,500 per household were required for land acquisition, leaving only $7,500 for construction.[7]

b. Quinta Monroy: the Project

Constrained by a budget of $7,500 per family and a space of less than a block for 93 families, the obvious strategy would have been to relocate to an area with cheaper land or pursue a high-rise typology that was space efficient, as so many housing projects have done in the past. However, Alejandro Aravena’s firm, ELEMENTAL, published the following goal on the project:

The aim was to keep the families’ social and economic networks, which they had created close to the center city, instead of evicting the families to the periphery. And we wanted the families to live in houses able to achieve a middle-class standard instead of condemning them to an everlasting social housing one.[8]

In their approach, ELEMENAL shifted the conventional view of slums as a problem and mined informality for its potential. Through this project, ELEMENTAL asked, “How can we, through design, channel people’s own capacity for building?”[9] The final project presented four groups of two-story concrete block structures each organized around a central courtyard. The units were modular and staggered to leave space for future buildout. The massing was undergirded by a modular logic, where each module measured 3 x 6 meters. The ground floor units each claimed 3 modules of space, of which two were built and one was left open, and the top floor unit each claimed four modules, of which two were built and two were left open. The built structures provided the very basics of housing necessities—kitchen, bathroom, some partition walls, and an internal stair. (Figures 2, 3, and 4 show the massing logic and initial amenities of the project.)

The housing core laid the foundation for building out a middle-income home with its generous spatial potential and high-quality facilities. As the residents settled into their new homes, they could expand into the allotted spaces in whatever way fit their needs. The units harbored infinite possibilities for tailoring to specific functions and aesthetics. It is this process of custom development that underly the project and won so much acclaim for being revolutionarily different from previous approaches. As the residents invest capital and labor into their homes, their sense of ownership and belonging would grow. Moreover, as the homes became more built out, its real estate value would increase—as much as doubling in some cases. In this sense, the social housing project would become an investment, echoing one of ELEMENTAL’s principles that “design guarantees incremental value and returns on investment over time, in order to stop considering it a mere “social expense.”[10]

However, the project did not stop at the construction of the physical core nor did the residents’ participation begin upon move-in. Throughout the assessment, design, and construction process, ELEMENTAL based key decisions regarding site layout, budget allocation, housing selection, and settlement maintenance on consultations with the residents.[11] After move-in, ELEMENTAL also hosted workshops and provided material for residents to highlight safe and inexpensive methods of constructing the expansion and managing the community.[12] By empowering the residents and understanding housing as a dynamic environment and investment rather than static infrastructure, Quinta Monroy challenged and critiqued traditional notions of housing.

III. The Theoretical Landscape

Although widely celebrated as an innovative project, the design principles behind Quinta Monroy by no means emerged out of a void. The essence of the project could be traced back to a global lineage of partial construction projects that harness the power of flexibility and informality as a response to resource constraints as well as strong domestic support for experimentation with housing programs by the Chilean government. Dialectically, the value of these design theories and such a political climate would be better appreciated in the context of the prevalent neoliberal economic system and modernist design credo. It is amidst this discourse that Quinta Monroy came into fruition, and thus, we must understand how the international campaign on informal settlements shaped—and was shaped by—the Quinta Monroy project.

a. Slums as Built Expressions of Marginalization or Entrepreneurship

There are two opposing ways of viewing informal settlements like the one in Quinta Monroy, and the perspective that the designer chooses determines what they see as the problem and, consequently, how they address the problem. Traditionally, places like Quinta Monroy were called “slums”—places where vices go to fester—and thus must be cleared. Critiquing this absolutist and derogative view, scholars pointed out the systems and values in these “slums”, preferring to call them “informal settlements.” Taking a step back, these two views are analogous to, and resultant from, the broader rhetoric of development and its critiques.

Conjuring to mind images of crowded, unsanitary, and crime-ridden city crevices, the concept of “slum” has been an eyesore of urban planning everywhere. These are the settlements that receive the poorest of infrastructure and are settled on the most dangerous landscapes. In this view, slums are lacking, or simply behind—a view that necessitates the eradication of slums as a solution. This perspective echoes the neoliberal views of development as represented by W.W. Rostow and Jeffrey Sachs—theorists who put development on a ladder on which undeveloped countries, or places, need to climb the rung of modernization in emulation of the developed.[13] As an extension of this view, modernist movements swept entire settlements tabula rasa into sterile and stifling high-rise apartments, citing the more “advanced” way of formal living. However, these efforts reduced the supply and total stock of available housing, displaced former slum residents, and lowered the standard of living, leaving an embarrassing mark on the history of housing.[14] After nearly a century of modernist interventions, the United Nation reports that over one billion people live in slums, and by 2030, 3 billion people will require adequate housing.[15]

A less ahistorical understanding of slums would acknowledge their origins as the unsightly consequence of the very economic regimes that built skyscrapers and fueled megacities. Urban theorist Mike Davis saw slums as a “warehousing of surplus humanity” that resulted from overurbanization and is a “legacy of a global political conjuncture—the worldwide debt crisis […] and the subsequent IMF-led restructuring of Third World economies […]”[16]

The IMF-mandated Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) of the 1980’s displaced or immiserated millions of traditional urbanites and were, in fact, ‘deliberate anti-urban in nature,’ designed to reverse any ‘urban bias’ in welfare policies, fiscal structure, or government investment.[17]

In other words, the tectonics of slums and cities is the physical expression of neoliberal process that widened poverty gaps and the juxtaposition of the two articulates their reciprocal relationship—the development of one at the cost of the other. Although more historically aware than the phenomenon-focused modernists, this acknowledgement still sees slums as the problem.

In response to the dark, determinist rhetoric of slums as antithetical to the city and the failures of the interventions that followed this view, a critique emerged. It understood informal settlements as not the anarchical accumulation of vices but as a hub of “people’s economy” that harnessed entrepreneurial energy in the face of bureaucratic systems that unfairly disadvantaged the poor.[18] Development economist William Easterly critiqued modernization approaches to development that favored top-down plans as embodied by the previously mentioned high-rise housing for being “neocolonial forms of utopian social engineering.” Distinguishing between “planners” and “searchers,” Easterly argued that searchers acknowledge the complexities of development and are engaged in the trial-and-error process by which development happens incrementally, effectively, and accountably.[19] Under Easterly’s framework, the residents of informal settlements are the searchers who organically develop their own systems and infrastructure that respond to local constrains and maximize collective power and entrepreneurial energy. Here the subject/object or principle/agent relationship is upset—compared to the modernist framework that put the planners as the subject and slum dwellers as the objects of development, this movement empowers the residents by putting them in the subject and agent role. As Easterly puts it simply: “The poor help themselves.”[20]

There is a milieu of work that understand the informal as not only positive, but desired and to be learned from. Sociology professor Asef Bayat, in his study of cities in South Asia, writes that informality can embody “flexibility, pragmatism, negotiation, as well as a constant struggle for survival and self-development.”[21] Author and Urban Studies fellow AbdouMaliq Simone found the same resourcefulness in informality in his studies on African cities:

African cities are characterized by incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections of residents that operate without clearly delineated notions of how the city is to be inhabited and used… These conjunctions become an infrastructure—a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city.[22]

Aravena’s statement that “with the right design slums and favelas may not be the problem, but actually a possible solution,” and “self-construction as customization, not deterioration” aligns Quinta Monroy to this critique of modernism.[23] Such a framework stands in opposition to the modernist and developmentalist view of housing—it suspends the prejudice of urban slums solely as a collection of undesired flaws and recognizes the organic power of informal urban life, allowing designers and planners to approach intervention in a different lens.

b. Incremental Design: Negotiating Planning and Informality

The recognition for the power of the informal is joined by the practical constraints of limited space, capital, and materials to fuel the rise of incremental design as an approach to improve the living conditions of informal settlements. Incremental housing—sometimes referred to as progressive development, starter house, or autoconstruction—mimics and formalizes an organic process of development in the informal sector. Starting with a makeshift core and transforming it, addition by addition, into a middle-income house over time and as resources become available is how about 70% of all urban housing in the global South are built.[24] This vernacular process became formalized in the academic disciplines through architect John F.C. Turner’s Essay “Housing as a Verb.” In it, Turner urged designers and planners to not view housing as a static package but as an ongoing project in which residents are co-creators.[25] Early applications of this perspective became known as the “site and services” approach, whereby the most essential and most expertise-laden part of the house, such as foundations, plumbing, electrical wiring, roof frames, and community infrastructure such as roads, sewers, garbage collections, and schools are provided upon move-in, thus spending the limited resources where the marginal utility is the highest across a greater number of beneficiaries. Many projects preceded Quinta Monroy in deploying this strategy, representing a range of initial provision, from the Orangi Pilot Project in Karachi, Pakistan that focused on ensuring access to sewage and sanitation systems, to the Aranya low-cost housing project in Indore, India offered up to several bedrooms. In Chile, this was adopted into initiatives like “Chile Barrio” and “Dynamic Social Housing without Debt” that promoted core-housing provision and resident-driven construction. [26]

It is in this climate that the Quinta Monroy project came into fruition, and by committing the buildings to a formalized framework, the project melds the technological know-how of the architects with the organic potential of the informal. However, while the strategy of incremental housing emerged from the recognition for the power of the informal, it nonetheless relies on the planning of a technocratic entity for execution. This brings us to the question posed at the very beginning of this paper: in this negotiation between the formal and the informal, the planners and the searchers, does incremental housing, as represented by Quinta Monroy, stand as a wholly independent concept, or does it retain a preference for planning?

IV. Impact Analysis

The answer to that question lies in the outcomes of the Quinta Monroy project. Following the acclaim of the Quinta Monroy project, at least a dozen housing projects including 2045 houses in Chile and Mexico were built in its footsteps.[27] Compared to other subsidized housing typology that were often abandoned and left to deteriorate, the Quinta Monroy project certainly reports higher rates of resident satisfaction.[28] All but one of the homes have been expanded to feature bright colors, comfortable layouts and significant retrofitting—perhaps even more adorned than what the plain exterior structures suggest the architects would have expected.[29] (Figures 5 and 6 show the vibrancy inside of the residents’ homes.) The project’s approach to alleviate poverty and inequality can be summarized into two ways: first, to improve the living conditions of its residents through the provision of basic infrastructure, and second, to include the poor in capital income by giving them investment-grade real estate. This section will examine how successfully the project achieves these two layers of objectives. Moreover, in these outcomes, it will become evident that Quinta Monroy was more a modernists’ interpretation of the vernacular rather than a wholesale critique of the modernist.

a. Improving Living Conditions

Quinta Monroy is first and foremost a housing project, so it must at least improve the standards of living for its residents. Most fundamentally, the project provided sanitation and drainage infrastructure as well as access to sunlight and ventilation, thereby upgrading previously unlivable conditions into what could qualify, on the infrastructure end, “medium-income” housing. An area accountign demonsrate an increase in dwelling space: the apprpoximately 4,500 square meters of built space became 3,384 square meters of architect construction, which was intended to be doubled to approximately 6,800 square meters after resident builtout, and had the potential of expanding into 17,622 square meters—four times the original space—should the residents maximize their expansion.[30] Within the first dozen years of move-in, all but one of the units have expanded into the allotted space, with more than half of the households even building beyond the property lines in the front and rear of the house and vertically adding new floors. Ground floor occupants extended into the courtyard, and upper floor residents built cantilevered rooms over the courtyard and created living spaces on the roof. (Figure 7 demonstrates a breakdown of the maximize spatial extension each unit can pursue.)

While the initiative to expand beyond the allotted space go to show the residents’ ownership and entrepreneurship and demonstrate efficient use of structure and space, it had an adverse effect on the standard of living. The increased density of additional expansions left many units, especially those on the ground floor and near the center of the community blocks, without proper access to light and ventilation. Not only are access to amenities diminishing, but the construction quality is also regressing to previous levels with increasing expansions. Many of the expansions use lightweight or salvaged material and haphazard construction methods that could be dangerous, causing two construction-related fires in 2012 and 2014.[31] Critics have gone so far as to suggest that the design strategy “has inadvertently created household spaces that in many instances replicate the ‘slum-like’ conditions they attempted to address.”[32] Over time, as expansion into spaces without clear ownership designation has facilitated a competition among residents to capture the space, creating rising disquiet and straining community relationship. The coveted sense of ownership also served to turn the community inward as they focused on their individual homes, leaving the community more fragmented.[33] It is evident that Quinta Monroy failed to fully appreciate the perils and powers of the informal—the architects expressed dismay at the undesired effects of the expansions beyond their plans. Retrospectively, the project merely planned for informality, leaving space for it, but ultimately attempting to confine informality to the property lines designated by the architects. At the end of the day, the project retained a modernist framework and through it, tried, and failed, to appropriate the power of the informal. Quinta Monroy remains, at its core, a planners’ project.

b. Jumpstarting Asset Base

Beyond a housing project, Quinta Monroy takes pride in being an investment vehicle. One of the biggest drivers of modern inequality is capital income, which is an exclusive club that yields compounding returns, making the rich richer.[34] Aravena recognizes the potential of capital ownership—among the objectives for Quinta Monroy, he writes:

We think that social housing should be seen as an investment and not as an expense. So we had to make that the initial subsidy can add value over time. All of us, when buying a house expect it to increase its value. But social housing, in an unacceptable proportion, is more similar to buy a car than to buy a house; every day, its value decreases.[35]

Thus, Quinta Monroy provides not only a home but also a key out of persistent poverty. It jumpstarts the asset base of its residents and to give them a vehicle of investment in which the residents can grow and accrue value.

There are a few ways in which inhabitants can realize the capital gains from investment of their houses. First, through rental income. In many cases, residents build additional rooms for their sons and daughters, but as the younger generation move out, residents choose to rent the space for supplementary income.[36] More entrepreneurial individuals have even started businesses in the extra space allowed in their homes.[37] Even while the homes are still being inhabited, its value continues to appreciate, especially with the expansion initiatives and given the central location of Quinta Monroy. In the first two years after move-in, the families had made an average of $750 in improvements on their home, raising their estimated values to approximately $20,000 each. Including the $10,000 subsidy from the government, this represented a return on investment of 1.86x; for the residents, this was a return on investment of 26.67x—all just in two years’ time. In one anecdotal example, one resident purchased a basic Quinta Monroy house at $400, and after he added four bedrooms and an extra bedroom, the value of his home increased to $50,000.[38] In the past few years, families have received inquiries for sale, and should they choose to sell, the cash inflow may allow the families to establish themselves in more formal sectors of the economy.[39] Even if the families choose to remain in their homes, the increasing value can act as collateral and increase the families’ access to capital. This point is a direct response to Sach’s theory of poverty trap, and while practically beneficial, is another obvious stroke to conform the residents to the ladder of development prescribed by the modernists.[40]

c. Other Impacts

What further reveals Quinta Monroy’s allegiance to the modernist is the criterion and value framework in which it is discussed. Most of the existing evaluations of Quinta Monroy stopped at its impact as a housing project and as an investment vehicle. This leaves a lot to be desired in terms of other ways in which the project impacted the residents’ lives as well as the spillover effects it had on the complex network connected to Quinta Monroy and its residents. In his theorization on the causes of poverty “What Kind of a Problem Is Poverty?” Professor Michael Katz highlighted the view of poverty as a pathology of place. Much like an incubator of livelihoods, the environment in which one lives can magnify the positive and negative factors and either create poverty or lift people out of poverty.[41] Then, if Quinta Monroy was a solution to poverty, then there are many other aspects of its effects that we must examine. Here are a few factors that would have given more insight to the effectiveness of the project:

- What were the effects the housing project on measurable standard of living metrics, such as health, education, crime rate, etc., of its resident community? Further, did an adjusted living condition impact the residents’ income, source of income, or entrepreneurial pursuits and business involvements, to any degree?

- How, if at all, did the greater sense of ownership and the prospect of expansion and investment in their homes change the residents’ spending patterns? One would hope that the project encouraged more spending on household durables and if not on dispensable consumption, then at least greater budgetary fastidiousness.

- Many families grew as relatives joined from other parts of the country—what can Quinta Monroy tell us about the remote effect that improved housing for relatives may have on migration?

- How does the effect of improved housing spillover to neighboring residential communities? To what extent does it address the previous complaints by neighbors, and to what extent does the increasing population in Quinta Monroy negatively affect life around the settlement?

Certainly, the existing data are too limited to conclude in a causational relationship between improved housing and the abovementioned metrics. The point of enumerating these examples is to illustrate the severely narrow scope of discourse surrounding the Quinta Monroy project. Like previous modernist projects, the subject remained the architect and the building, pushing the experience of the residents into the background. Without understanding the effect of housing on a broader set of criteria, reliance on spatial improvement and anecdotal narrative alone fall into the same narrow set of values on which modernist projects are based.

IV. Conclusion

In review, the Quinta Monroy housing project located in central Iquique, Chile was directly sought by the slum dwellers themselves, who faced threats of eviction and fought to stay in the area by formalizing their settlement through government housing programs. The Chilean government’s existing housing initiative subsidized the project, so on the project scale, the “donor” was the government, and the beneficiaries the recipients of the subsidy. Taking a step back, this project is a stroke of a redistributing scheme in which taxpayers fronted the improvement in livelihood of the poorer citizens and also benefitted from a cleaner, safer urban neighborhood. ELEMENTAL, the architecture firm, designed the final product—a porous community of housing core that left room for resident-driven expansion—hailed from a milieu of intervention theories that, as a critique to the technological override of neoliberal top-down planning, created space for the organic sensitivity of bottom-up development. The housing project aimed to lift its residents out of poverty by improving the physical standard of living and creating an investment base for asset appreciation—both of which the project achieved. Despite its emphasis on proposing an alternative to modernist and neoliberal housing solutions, it is as a British architect concludes, Quinta Monroy “was standardized concrete modernism alternating, like the fronts and backs of playing cards, with favela-style spontaneity.”[42]

The Quinta Monroy housing project is an instance in which architecture breached its innovative frontier. Whereas the traditional discipline’s engagement with contemporary issues remained on a commentary- and critique-basis, wielding design as tool and aesthetics as medium, this project took an active role in shaping contemporary issues, using design to dictate action and action to necessitate change. It is as ELEMENTAL brands themselves—a “do tank” as opposed to a “think tank.” Aravena wrote, “that is how we contribute using architectural tools, to non-architectural questions — in this case, how to overcome poverty.”[43] However, in this paper, we asked, does Quinta Monroy so much as challenge the status quo in social housing typology, or simply features superficial changes.

An initial view of the project suggests that in melding together the technological expertise of top-down planning and the organic sensitivity of bottom-up searching or developing that can be read as a critique of the neoliberal and modernist approaches to housing. However, this paper has shown that upon closer dissection of the relationship between planning and searching in this project, the planning aspects come out on top of the power structure in this framework. As such, Quinta Monroy, like the modernist housing projects that it sought to critique, experienced the similar pains of fragmented community life and deteriorating living conditions. Our study of Quinta Monroy alludes to the greater question of whether it is possible to reconcile planning and searching, or if the attempt to harness both will inevitably compromise the integrity of one. Are the ills of modernism endemic to the very discipline of architecture and design, and is the very existence of development as a discipline antithetical to its goals? While Quinta Monroy is one case of critique against modernism among many and therefore cannot conclusively answer these questions, it demonstrates, even if without success, a willingness for the architecture and planning disciplines to engage in discourse and challenge the neoliberal and modernist approaches.

Illustrations

(Figure 1) Evolution of the Quinta Monroy site plan over time.[44]

(Figure 1.5) Quinta Monroy before intervention.[45]

(Figure 2) Quinta Monroy immediately after construction—exterior and interior.[46]

(Figure 3) Massing logic—stacking to allow for space for extensions.[47]

(Figure 4) Sample plan showing provided amenities.[48]

(Figure 5) Interior of Quinta Monroy homes after resident retrofit.

(Figure 6) Exterior of Quinta Monroy after resident retrofit.[49]

(Figure 7) Spatial accounting of how residents may maximize their unit expansions.[50]

Works Cited

(* denotes reading from class)

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Carrasco, Sandra, O’Brien, David. “Beyond the Freedom to Build: Long-Term Outcomes of Elemental’s Incremental Housing in Quinta Monroy.” SciELO Brazil, no. 13 (2021). doi: 10.1590/2175-3369.013.e20200001. https://www.scielo.br/j/urbe/a/ZCgQWz9QtCjQhSdxvxQQY6q/?lang=en.

Carrasco, Sandra, O’Brien, David. “Contested Incrementalism: Elemental’s Quinta Monroy Settlement Fifteen Years On.” Frontiers of Architectural Research, no. 10 (2021): 263-273. doi: doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2020.11.00. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095263520300728.

*Davis, Mike. “Planet of Slums.” New Left Review, March/April 2004.

Gray, Annemarie. “The Evolving Process of Incremental Social Housing in Chile.” The Resilient Cities Housing Initiative (RCHI) at MIT, June 15, 2014. https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5787b70d29687fd4e14dff41/t/595023a7d2b857fe3aa641cd/1498424235988/QuintaMonroyCaseStudy.pdf.

Halloran, Vincent. “Solving the Housing Crisis Half-a-House at a Time: Incremental Housing as a Means to Fulfilling the Human Right to Housing.” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review, no. 52 (2020): 95-130, February 10, 2021, https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2600&context=umialr.

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*Easterly, William. The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good. New York: The Penguin Press, 2006.

Katz, Michael B.. The Undeserving Poor : America's Enduring Confrontation with Poverty: Fully Updated and Revised. Cary: Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 2013. Accessed November 16, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central.

*Sachs, Jeffrey. The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time. New York: The Penguin Press, 2005.

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de Ferrari, Felipe, de Arce, Rodrigo Perez. “The Raw and the Cooked: Past, Present, and Future in Quinta Monroy, Iquique, Chile.” Wohnmodelle, Housing Models – Experimentation and Everyday Life, October 2008, https://doarchreading2020.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/perez-de-arce-and-ferrari_the-raw-and-the-cooked.pdf, http://www.plancomun.com/publications/housing-models-experimentation-and-everyday-life.

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[1] Alex Park, “Has This Chilean Architect Figured Out How to Fix Slums?” Mother Jones, June 11, 2014, https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/06/want-reduce-sprawl-build-half-house/. [2] Martha Thorne et al, “Jury Citation: Alejandro Aravera,” The Pritzker Architecture Prize, The Hyatt Foundation, accessed November 10, 2021, https://www.pritzkerprize.com/jury-citation-ale-jan-dro-ara-ve-na. [3] Sandra Carrasco, David O’Brien, “Beyond the Freedom to Build: Long-Term Outcomes of Elemental’s Incremental Housing in Quinta Monroy,” SciELO Brazil, no. 13 (2021), doi: 10.1590/2175-3369.013.e20 200001, https://www.scielo.br/j/urbe/a/ZCgQWz9QtCjQhSdxvxQQY6q/?lang=en. [4] Sandra Carrasco, David O’Brien, “Revisit: Quina Monroy by Elemental,” The Architectural Review, January 4, 2021, https://www.architectural-review.com/buildings/housing/revisit-quinta-monroy-by-elemental. [5] Mario Navarro, “Housing Finance Policy in Chile,” Land Line, July 2005, republished in Lincoln St., accessed November 10, 2021, https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/articles/housing-finance-policy-chile. [6] Cathelijne Nuijsink “Less Money, More Creativity: Alejandro Aravena initiates housing projects for Chile’s poor with interdisciplinary firm Elemental,” QM Mark Magazine, no. 15 (2008): 175-183, http://www.elementalchile.cl/wp-content/uploads/080814_QM_Mark_Magazine_HQ.pdf. [7] Carrasco, O’Brien, “Revisit…” [8] ELEMENTAL, “4 Incremental Housing Projects,” ELEMENTAL, accessed November 10, 2021, http://www.elementalchile.cl/en/. [9] Af Nina Tory-Henderson, “Quinta Monroy, Residential,” Danish Architecture Center, accessed November 10, 2021, https://dac.dk/en/knowledgebase/architecture/quinta-monroy/. [10] Matylda Kryzkowski, “Quinta Monroy by Alejandro Aravena,” Dezeen, November 12, 2008, https://www.dezeen.com/2008/11/12/quinta-monroy-by-alejandro-aravena/. [11] Carrasco, O’Brien, “Beyond the Freedom to Build…” [12] Vincent Halloran, “Solving the Housing Crisis Half-a-House at a Time: Incremental Housing as a Means to Fulfilling the Human Right to Housing,” University of Miami Inter-American Law Review, no. 52 (2020): 95-130, February 10, 2021, https://repository.law.miami.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2600&context=umialr. [13] Jeffrey Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time, (New York: Penguin Press, 2005), 18-20. [14] Vinit Mukhija, “Urban design for a planet of informal cities,” in Companion to Urban Design, ed. Tridib Banerjee, Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, (New York: Routledge, 2010), 547-584. [15] “11. Sustainable Cities and Communities: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable,” United Nations Statistics Division, accessed November 10, 2021, https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-11/. [16] Mike Davis, Panet of Slums, (New York: Verso, 2007), 14-15. [17] Mike Davis, “Planet of Slums,” New Left Review, March/April 2004. [18] Ananya Roy, “Urban Informality: The Production of Space and Practice of Planning,” in The Oxford Handbook of City Planning, ed. Randall Crane, Rachel Weber, September, 2012, doi: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195374995.013.0033. [19] William Easterly, The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good, (New York: The Penguin Press, 2006), 27. [20] Ibid. [21] Asef Bayat, “Radical Religion and the Habitus of the Dispossessed: Does Islamic Militancy Have an Urban Ecology?” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 31, no. 3 (2007): 579-90. [22] AbdouMaliq Simone, “Pirate Towns: Reworking Social and Symbolic Infrastructures in Johannesburg and Douala,” Urban Studies, no. 43: 357-370. [23] Carrasco, O’Brien, “Beyond the Freedom to Build…” [24] Reinhard Goethert, “Incremental Housing: A proactive urban strategy,” Monday Developments, September 2010, 23-25, http://web.mit.edu/incrementalhousing/articlesPhotographs/pdfs/PagesMondayMag.pdf [25] Sam Greenspan, “Half a House,” October 11, 2016, 99 Percent Invisible, no. 231, 22:15, https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/half-a-house/. [26] Navarro, “Housing Finance Policy in Chile.” And Carrasco, O’Brien, “Beyond the Freedom to Build…” [27] Sandra Carrasco, David O’Brien, “Contested Incrementalism: Elemental’s Quinta Monroy Settlement Fifteen Years On,” Frontiers of Architectural Research, no. 10 (2021): 263-273, doi: doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2020.11.00, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2095263520300728. [28] Carrasco, O’Brien, “Contested Incrementalism…” and Felipe de Ferrari, Rodrigo Perez de Arce, “The Raw and the Cooked: Past, Present, and Future in Quinta Monroy, Iquique, Chile.” Wohnmodelle, Housing Models – Experimentation and Everyday Life, October 2008, https://doarchreading2020.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/perez-de-arce-and-ferrari_the-raw-and-the-cooked.pdf [29] De Arce, de Ferrari, “The Raw and the Cooked…” [30] Carrasco, O’Brien, “Contested Incrementalism…” [31] Carrasco, O’Brien, “Contested Incrementalism…” and Carrasco, O’Brien, “Beyond the Freedom to Build…” [32] Carrasco, O’Brien, “Revisit…” [33] Ibid. [34] Sachs, The End of Poverty… [35] Kryzkowski, “Quinta Monroy…” [36] Carrasco, O’Brien, “Beyond the Freedom to Build…” [37] Ibid. [38] Park, “Has This Chilean Architect…” [39] “Quinta Monroy: A Victim of its Own Success?” [40] Sachs, The End of Poverty… [41] Michael B. Katz, “What Kind of a Problem is Poverty?” in The Undeserving Poor: America’s Enduring Confrontation with Poverty: Fully Updated and Revised, Cary: Oxford University Press, 2013. Accessed November 16, 2021. ProQuest Ebook Central. [42] Halloran, “Solving the Housing Crisis…” [43] Tory Henderson, “Quinta Monroy, Residential.” [44] Carrasco, O’Brien, “Revisit…” [45] “Quinta Monroy: A Victim of its Own Success.” [46] “Quinta Monroy / ELEMENTAL,” ArchDaily, December 31, 2008, https://www.archdaily.com/10775/quinta-monroy-elemental. [47] Ibid. Carrasco, O’Brien, “Beyond the Freedom to Build…” [48] “11. Sustainable Cities and Communities: Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable,” United Nations Statistics Division, accessed November 10, 2021, https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/report/2019/goal-11/.[48] Ibid. [49] “Quinta Monroy housing, Iquique,” Architecturaviva.com, accessed November 11, 2021, https://arquitecturaviva.com/works/viviendas-quinta-monroy-1 [50] Carrasco, O’Brien, “Contested Incrementalism…”