Self-help housing / autoconstruction

This is a historical inquiry on self-help housing, or autoconstruction as its French equivalent, a term mainly overlooked by architects but favoured by policymakers for low-cost housing development. Self-help housing has been a field of ‘aid’ or ‘assistance’ by the United Nations and subject to the foreign policy of the United States after the World War II. By either colonial or post-colonial practices, it has been an important tool for housing communities. The term is mostly supplemented with adjectives of ‘aided’ or ‘assisted’ which denote financial and organizational governance of housing. As a model of housing provision, self-help housing embodies policymaking, planning, designing, constructing and inhabiting as a practice. Apart from providing aid/assistance for land provision and construction, the model casts a role for inhabitants as builders, which limits the mode of design and construction in favour of low-cost methods and materials as well as of ‘laymen’. Although politically popularised for ‘under-developed’ countries, self-help housing was also operative in ‘developed’ or ‘developing’ countries in Europe and redefined the role of architects in housing production in the postwar period. Herein, workers’ housing programs in two Marshall Plan countries (France and Turkey) suggest a comparative definition of self-help housing as a common model for different geographies based on cooperatives which integrated labour unions and workers in housing design and construction.