Designing adaptable housing : the specific case of INFONAVIT

Abstract

The traditional way of designing housing of the Mexican government agencies, obliges the population they serve (mostly working class people), to live in rigid dwellings that have little or no flexibility to be adapted to the dweller's changing needs throughout time, or to the technological and economic improvements. The increasing participation of the Government agencies in the production of housing in Mexico, a nd the critical housing shortage, makes urgent a restatement of the design guide lines that have been used up to now. The purpose of this thesis is to emphasize the need of adaptable housing and to suggest some changes to the standards traditionally used by public developers in order to make their housing design more adaptable. Taking as a case study the main public housing agency in Mexico ( INFONAVIT) , first I made a survey in one of the oldest and biggest housing complexes of INFONAVIT (el Rosario), in order to clarify certain issues about the use of spaces and the kind of needs that make dwellers modify their dwellings. Afterwards, I analyzed these changes to find out patterns of modification, looking for the changes that are most likely to occur and in what ways these changes can be facilitated. In the final part of the thesis, I make some suggestions of alterations that could be done to the standards of design in order to produce more adaptable housing.