Project Reports

My work as a scholar is particular in that I engage in high theory, publishing research pieces in books and journals, but I also deeply engage with the practice of architecture and, for the purposes of that practice, I do also carry out research. Often, that research is delivered in the form of professional reports like those listed on this page.

Thus, part of my job as an architect whose practice focuses on social design work is to write reports for the planning and execution of those projects, usually for the project funding and executing organizations. Most of those reports are field-based pieces of research (combining qualitative and quantitative research) that ultimately inform regulations in governmental programs, particularly low-income housing programs. Thus, they are research pieces that ultimately materialize as houses.

THE REPORTS

My most recent reports (as of 2024) are for a new housing project in Nicaragua. In the first report for that project, I present and elaborate upon the findings from a preliminary qualitative assessment of rural housing needs in the country, which I conducted through field study of the general housing situation in 26 rural communities in the Dry Corridor and Caribbean Coast regions. Part of that study included analyzing the outcomes of 14 different housing projects catering to families in some of those communities. I carried out these field visits with a team of Nicaraguan colleagues in the Fall of 2023.

Prior to that work, I have written and contributed to writing reports on housing and other initiatives in Ecuador, El Salvador, Guyana, and Suriname, among other countries.

Below is a sample of reports on one of those countries, Guyana.

Guyana

The reports below are related to one project, Guyana’s Sustainable Housing in the Hinterland. This was the first housing government program catering to indigenous populations in Guyana. I have described this program, which I designed, in two academic papers (Arboleda 2014 and Arboleda 2020). The program’s execution was led by Donell Bess and Cy Rodrigues from the Guyana Central Housing and Panning Authority and by Ophelie Chévalier and Patricio Zambrano from the funding organization, the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

These reports detail the steps in the design process, from the initial assessments to the participatory design workshops, construction of the prototype houses, writing of the program operating regulations, carrying out evaluations, and expanding the program to the rest of the country.

Thus, these reports sequentially tell the story of the Guyana project. Totaling over 600 pages, the reports explain why I ultimately decided not to design the houses myself but, instead, designed the logic by which villagers would design their own housing through the use of an ethnoarchitectural bottom-up participatory approach.

For these reports, I carried out field research over a period of nine years (2009–2018). This was a form of applied research with its ultimate goal being the production of houses—about 650 in total as of 2020, with new constructions still being built after that. (My involvement with the program ended in 2019).

Report No. 1
Guyana Hinterland: Housing Needs Assessment, Indigenous Communities of Regions One and Nine, 2010.

This is a field assessment of housing needs, which I made by consulting with 321 (out of approximately 870) households from eight indigenous communities in the Guyana Hinterland. The communities where this assessment was carried out were those selected by the Guyana government as beneficiaries of this pilot housing program.

Based on the needs assessment, in this report I also propose how to execute the housing program. Among other recommendations, the proposal stipulates that beneficiaries (both families and communities overall as territorial organizations) should be paid for their assets, including natural resources and labor, and should not be resettled to housing schemes; instead, the program should build houses wherever the beneficiaries prefer them to be.

The recommendations proposed in this report ultimately became the ruling principles for the program.

Report No. 2
Participatory Design: Guyana Region One (Barima – Waini), 2010.

One of the key recommendations from the previous report was that the Guyana Hinterland housing program should be entirely participatory, with community participation including the design of the houses. This report offers details on the method, activities, and results of the first participatory housing design workshop for the program. This workshop was carried out to produce the housing designs for the mostly Arawak communities of Region One (Barima – Waini), located in the Orinoco river basin area of northwest Guyana, which borders Venezuela. The report details the design proposals made by community members and, based on these, the form-related characteristics of the proposed house model, as well as the house floor plan and a preliminary budget drawn from a participatory budgeting exercise.

Report No. 3
Participatory Design: Guyana Region Nine (Upper Takutu – Upper Essequibo), 2011.

Analogous to the report above, this document reports on the results (characteristics, design, budget, etc.) from the participatory housing design workshop involving the mostly Macushi beneficiary communities of Region Nine (Upper Takutu – Upper Essequibo, located in central-western Guyana, which borders Brazil). This was the second region covered by the pilot program.

Report No. 4
Prototype Construction: Barima – Waini Region, 2011.

Based on the lessons learned from the needs assessment process described in Report No. 1, in the early planning phase of the Hinterland housing program I proposed that the program should have two different components: a “full housing” component catering to the families in greatest housing need, and a “roofing units” component for those families that, although also in great need, had structurally sound houses but with deficient roofs.

I describe the roofing units component in the next report (Report No. 5). In Report No. 4, I focus on the full housing component. Specifically, I report on the results of building a full housing prototype for Region One. The construction was carried out following the design resulting from the community design workshop described in Report No. 2. We built the prototype closely following all the specifications made by the community designers, including spatial division, materials, and others.

Based on the results from the prototype construction, in this report I propose a number of significant changes to the execution of the program, thus adding, revising, and further detailing the proposals made in Report No. 1.

Report No. 5
Roofing Component of the Program (Rainwater Harvesting Housing Units), 2012.

This document reports on the construction of the Region One prototype for the roofing units component of the program. The idea of this component resulted from a finding made during the fieldwork research in the communities as territorial units: A significant number of families were able to finish structurally sound houses but lacked the funding to roof them. Thus, they resorted to using palm thatch as a temporary roofing material, and the water leaks from these temporary roofs ended up compromising the houses’ structural integrity. Thus, over time these families were poised to lose their investment as they were faced with having to build the houses again from scratch.

Thus, the roofing component of the program was originally conceived as a “push” to help families finish their houses by providing the materials to install a corrugated metal (“zinc”) roof. However, during the construction of the prototype reported in this document, I learned that the need for this component was far more significant than simply an economic push. As I describe it in this report:

A fundamental premise of the roofing unit selection process is that the household needs a zinc roof, not because without zinc the house is not finished, but because they need an urgent solution to water provision. In sum, in the case of the roofing unit, roof means water.
[...]
To put it as a formula, the housing necessities and conditions of roofing unit-qualifying beneficiaries must always include all of the following four, in this order of importance: Roofing unit = low income + water necessity + leaking thatch roof + good structure.

Under this program component, then, beneficiaries received the materials to install a corrugated metal roof, plus the piping, tank, and other elements to also install in their finished houses a rainwater harvesting system. (The full housing component also included this type of system). These and other characteristics of this component of the program are described in this report.

The roofing component of the Hinterland program would end up becoming the most interesting one in terms of its impact, how it evolved, and how it was ultimately appropriated and modified by the villagers themselves, as shown in some of the following reports.

Report No. 6
Beneficiary Selection Rationale, 2012.

The construction of the two prototypes described in the previous two reports also yielded essential information for moving into the construction phase of the housing program. This information included an updated budget based on the actual costs of the prototype construction, as well as other details on how the program should be carried out in order to ensure the delivery of the houses.

One essential piece of information was how to select the program beneficiaries. This selection was made in different phases, starting with a regular application process that involved interviews with the potential beneficiaries, followed by discussions about preselected beneficiaries with the community Toshaos (i.e., traditional leaders), the Central Housing Authority, and the Village Councils. Last, the list of beneficiaries was finalized through a public discussion held between the Councils and community members in an open meeting. This report includes details about that process.

Report No. 7
Technical Documentation – Building Plans and Budget: Upper Takutu – Upper Essequibo Region, 2012.

This report includes the budget and building plans for the construction of the Region Nine houses for the Hinterland program. The building plans are presented in a simple, legible, letter-size format to facilitate their reading and handling by all of the community participants in the construction. Nonetheless, in the end, the masons and carpenters in charge, many of whom had partaken as community designers of the houses, knew their designs so well that in most cases they built from memory, seldom referring to the building plans.

Report No. 8
Pilot Program Evaluation, 2014.

This is a comprehensive evaluation made after the construction of about 200 houses for the pilot program. The evaluation was based on the same five indicators of housing needs used for the needs assessment documented in Report No. 1, following United Nations standards: overcrowding, access to freshwater, access to sanitation, security of tenure, and structural quality of the houses.

In addition to describing the changes in these quantitative indicators and providing details about lessons learned, in this report I make recommendations specific to each of the indicators for an eventual expansion of the program (which ultimately did occur).

Report No. 9
Program Operating Regulations, 2015.

These are the operating regulations of the Hinterland housing program, which I wrote and then updated based on the many lessons learned during the implementation of the program.

Report No. 10
New Program Design and Participatory Needs Assessment: Barima – Waini Region, 2015.

After the pilot phase of the program concluded, the government of Guyana decided to expand the program to the whole country. This expansion started with 29 new villages in Regions One and Nine. In this document, I report on the results of the needs assessment carried out in the Region One villages of that group. The data for this assessment, also included in this report, were collected using my own version of social mapping, a participatory research method that was also employed during the pilot program.

In this report, I also propose some modifications to the expanded program design based on the evaluation results documented in Report No. 8. A major focus of those recommendations was the roofing component of the program. As the execution of the pilot program progressed, beneficiaries in both regions had proposed to transform that component into a new “roofing from scratch” version.

This transformation meant that the roofing part of the program evolved from simply a re-roofing endeavor into a model of incremental houses that started with a basic shelter—frame, roof, temporary walls, and water harvesting system—which was progressively developed by beneficiaries until it became a full house. In this report, I recommend how, where, and in what terms to implement that villager-developed version of the roofing model during the program expansion.

Report No. 11
New Program Design and Participatory Needs Assessment: Upper Takutu – Upper Essequibo Region, 2017.

Analogous to the previous report, in this report I document the results of the needs assessment carried out for the new Region Nine communities that were part of the program expansion. I also recommend how to carry out that expansion, including the subsidy distribution. My subsidy-related recommendations include the type of beneficiaries that should get priority to receive a full housing subsidy (i.e., those in much greater poverty than the average) and those that should instead be considered for the roofing-from-scratch village-developed program (i.e., those with a better chance of completing a house on their own by working incrementally).

Report No. 12
Roofing Units: Evaluation and Beneficiary Selection Criteria, 2017.

One of my recommendations in the previous report was that, to increase the likelihood that a beneficiary of a roofing-from-scratch subsidy could finish the house on their own, it was necessary to pre-identify the characteristics of a typically successful beneficiary for this kind of model. I recommended that such a typification be made based on the experience of beneficiaries of this villager-conceived initiative during the pilot execution, including those who had experienced more and less success with the incremental approach.

This report provides the results of an evaluation of all the roofing-from-scratch housing units that villagers built during the pilot program in three communities of Region Nine: Massara, Annai, and Kwatamang. The evaluation, which included the full range of possible outcomes from most to least successful, was based on onsite inspections of the houses and interviews with the beneficiaries/builders. Based on that evaluation, this report offers the profile of a type of beneficiary for whom the roofing-from-scratch program component would be a good fit.

Report No. 13
Participatory Housing Design: Wapishana Communities of the Rupununi River Basin, 2018.

This document reports on the community design process for the Hinterland program expansion to Region Nine’s central-western area. A new full housing design was necessary because this is the settlement area of the Wapishana, a new ethno-cultural group that would be included in the program. The Wapishana communities were now to be added to the largely Arawak and Macushi communities with whom the pilot program had started in the region.

The report includes details about the participatory design method employed and the community design resulting from the participatory process. The design description includes the model’s characteristics in terms of materials, orientation, and spatial distribution, as well as its passive climate-conditioning features.

Having completed the design of the program expansion, including recommendations for the execution, needs assessments, and the new housing designs, I ended my involvement with the Hinterland project, which continued in the hands of the Guyana government.