Sites-and-Services

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, and financial loan schemes that offered inhabitants the means to invest in their homes. 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.

This online exhibition is the outcome of our Autumn 2022 seminar course, ‘The City Lived’, in which students, beyond the praise and criticism directed at such projects, 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. They focused on 3 emblematic 1970–80s projects, in Ismailia, Soyapango, and Nairobi. After a general presentation of each project documenting how it came into being, each student explored a particular subtheme to analyze the project’s afterlife, ranging from material culture and social justice to the impact of road infrastructure.