Sites and Services

The Autumn 2022 edition of our seminar series ‘The City Lived’ focused on ‘sites-and-services’, an important housing paradigm that was mobilized in the context of development aid to provide cost-efficient housing for the global poor.

This housing strategy consisted of providing ‘sites’ – plots of land to construct dwellings on – in combination with a set of ‘services’, ranging from infrastructural features, such as sewerage and waste disposal, to market-based interventions that aimed to make cheap building material more easily accessible, or financial loan schemes that offered inhabitants the means to invest in their homes. It often operated on a large scale, and targeted thousands of households in a single project. For several decades from the 1970s, it was heavily endorsed by major actors such as the World Bank and the United Nations as a cost-efficient way to meet the most basic housing needs of a high number of people, whilst simultaneously offering authorities the means to direct the enormous growth of spontaneous settlements in the urban peripheries as part of their broader urban development plans. As such, these sites-and-services schemes have left a major imprint on many cities in the Global South. Despite this impact, however, their histories are not well documented.

Beyond its praise and criticism, in this seminar course we studied sites-and-services projects in the first place as material artefacts: as man- and woman-made built environments that have shaped the lives of thousands of people, whose history for that very reason deserves to be studied. In doing so, we discussed two broader themes. On the one hand, sites-and-services projects allow us to problematize the notion of housing expertise and how it was mobilized in the Global South. And on the other, since these were essentially unfinished projects that relied on their future inhabitants to complete their dwellings, they force us to acknowledge the act of user appropriation and inhabitation as an integral part of architecture projects.