El Caliche Public Housing

SIGUS Workshops include the January Workshop Abroad. This 2-week, field-based workshop is help in cities through the world - hosted by a local university in collaboration with NGOs and city authorities. The focus is on policies and programs which tackle community needs, drawing on interviews with families and field observation.

Many developing countries bear the traces of large-scale public housing construction as a solution for housing the urban poor. In El Caliche, an informal neighborhood in the Dominican Capital, three public housing complexes line the edge of the settlement. The structure were built to rehouse approximately 200 families who were displaced by a ring-road project in 1986. The physical structures are at a different scale than the one-, two-, and three-story homes that predominate in El Caliche. The following paper compares the public housing with the surrounding city fabric that developed informally. The stark contrast between the adjacent housing types illustrates what costs and benefits are associated with multi-story public housing and some alternative approaches are proposed as a result of the case study.