Papers by Gabriel Arboleda
Housing and Society, 2014
Abstract Participation practice and critical theory have coexisted for almost half a century. How... more Abstract Participation practice and critical theory have coexisted for almost half a century. However, the tenets of practice have experienced little change, regardless of how prescriptive or impassioned the criticism has been. What happens when participation practice fully engages its criticism in the field? This paper reports on the findings from one such project. The Second Low-Income Settlement Program (LISP II) is the first low-income housing program offered by a public institution to Amerindian (indigenous) communities in the Guyana Hinterland. The author, who was involved as the program designer and author of the operating regulations, describes the program’s reexamination of participation throughout the conception and execution phases. Afterwards he reflects upon the outcome—what could be achieved, and what were found to be the limitations of participation practice as well as its academic criticism. The paper focuses on the issue of participation and governmentality raised by the Foucauldian criticism, one of the most popular threads in participation criticism today. It concludes that it is possible to successfully materialize a participatory housing project while taking into account the appeals from critical theory. However, not all the formulations from theory are applicable in the field, and participation is inherently a limited approach. It should be considered an intermediate one; a transitive approach towards community agency.
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and that of the City of Vientiane Traditional building languages and materials are neglected in m... more and that of the City of Vientiane Traditional building languages and materials are neglected in many rural areas due to economic pressures, yet, paradoxically, they are iconized in the city. The temple, for its part, obeys a totally different logic, externally appearing almost unalterable, even when new ones are built everyday. As for the city of Vientiane, it is today an appealing architectural collage that adds together tradition recalled by the French with Le Corbusier evoked by the Russian. The different types in rural architecture in Northwestern Laos1, across the road between Vientiane and Luang Prabang can be explained as variations in the classic theme of the two-slope roof (figs. 1 to 11).2 3 Those variations occur in three main ways: varying the length of the roof in one of its sides (2), closing one or two endings with differently shaped roofs (3 to 8) or adjoining a second two-slope roof structure (9 to 11).4 What such modifications probably express is a typical concern ...
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This thesis explores the change in the building structures of a Northeastern Ecuadorian group, th... more This thesis explores the change in the building structures of a Northeastern Ecuadorian group, the Secoya of the Aguarico River. In the context of environmental activism and cultural survival there are many reasons to lament major alterations in the Secoya's lifestyle in recent years. One of the most visible transformations experienced by this group is the abandonment of several traditional architectural types, including the Jaihus'e or communitarian longhouse. The thesis focuses on understanding the forces that have influenced the Secoya decision to adopt the Zinc House type, a metallic-roofed individual housing unit. These include change in their economic systems, depletion of the natural resources necessary for traditional construction, Western cultural pressure, difficulty to adapt the traditional structures to a modern life, and finally a historical predisposition to change. In short, the Secoya changed firstly because everything around changed, leaving them with no oth...
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Author(s): Arboleda, Gabriel | Advisor(s): AlSayyad, Nezar | Abstract: Ethnoengineering is a so-c... more Author(s): Arboleda, Gabriel | Advisor(s): AlSayyad, Nezar | Abstract: Ethnoengineering is a so-called culturally appropriate building method tested between 2002 and 2010 by the Ecuadorian government, among the country's poorest indigenous peoples and peasant communities. It was part of a 45 million dollar infrastructure building program named FISE III. Ethnoengineering sought to incorporate what it called the cultural particularities of an ethnic group into the process of rural infrastructural modernization, with an eye on general sustainability. In simple terms, the method proposed that modern + culture = sustainable.By closely studying the literature on the method, building plans and reports on its implementation, and the cases of 18 out of the 31 beneficiary communities, I focus on the negotiation of encountered visions about modernity. The modern was a contentious issue that often pitted FISE and the ethnoengineering supporters against comuneros or low-income villagers. Whi...
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Journal of Architectural Education
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Journal of Architectural Education
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JAE: Journal of Architectural Education, 2020
Despite its popularity, the high-design approach to social design has inherent flaws. This is the... more Despite its popularity, the high-design approach to social design has inherent flaws. This is the case even when the high-design project involves community participation. Indeed, participation in and of itself is not enough to address issues of power that affect the practice of social design as a whole. The mere application of participation does not ensure an equal relationship between practitioners and users. Instead, a possible solution arises from subverting the horizontality of participatory design by adopting a bottom-up approach, in which designers position themselves at the bottom of the design hierarchy. This approach is exemplified here with a water-focused housing project in Guyana, designed by the author following this positionality shift principle.
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Participation practice and critical theory have coexisted for almost half a century. However, the... more Participation practice and critical theory have coexisted for almost half a century. However, the tenets of practice have experienced little change, regardless of how prescriptive or impassioned the criticism has been. What happens when participation practice fully engages its criticism in the field? This paper reports on the findings from one such project. The Second Low-Income Settlement Program (LISP II) is the first low-income housing program offered by a public institution to Amerindian (indigenous) communities in the Guyana Hinterland. The author, who was involved as the program designer and author of the operating regulations, describes the program’s reexamination of participation throughout the conception and execution phases. Afterwards he reflects upon the outcome—what could be achieved, and what were found to be the limitations of participation practice as well as its academic criticism. The paper focuses on the issue of participation and governmentality raised by the Foucauldian criticism, one of the most popular threads in participation criticism today. It concludes that it is possible to successfully materialize a participatory housing project while taking into account the appeals from critical theory. However, not all the formulations from theory are applicable in the field, and participation is inherently a limited approach. It should be considered an intermediate one; a transitive approach towards community agency.
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Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture, 2011
It has become commonplace in architectural and urban literature to characterize indigenous vernac... more It has become commonplace in architectural and urban literature to characterize indigenous vernacular dwellings and settlements as sustainable. Yet, what are the actual limits of this conception when some of the world’s most serious environmental, social, economic and political problems center on traditional settlements today?
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Identity Politics and the Reinscription of Space. Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Working Paper Series, 2008
The building change among the Upper Amazonian Secoya reveals the limits of expectations that are ... more The building change among the Upper Amazonian Secoya reveals the limits of expectations that are commonly held regarding sustainable building in traditional environments. This paper gives these expectations the name "the architecturally noble savage," supporting the argument that this is a myth, in the sense of a narrative that is often repeated in architecture writing and practice. The paper contests six particular propositions of this myth: immutability, naturalness, productiveness, infallibility, nostalgia and absoluteness. It ends with an appeal to go beyond the polarized construction between natural (sustainable) and industrial (unsustainable). If an inherently unsustainable solution such as a tin roofing corrugated sheet can have a sustainable side as the Secoya case shows, then traditional sustainable buildings are not after all special objects, because any building could in the end be sustainable given the right circumstances.
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Architecture, Culture, and the Challenges of Globalization: Proceedings of the 2002 ACSA International Conference, 2002
This rather descriptive paper came as a result of a few years practicing in Ecuador's Upper Amazo... more This rather descriptive paper came as a result of a few years practicing in Ecuador's Upper Amazonia. I wrote it when I was still in Ecuador, and it was my first foray into American academia.
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Chapter in Books by Gabriel Arboleda
Aesthetics of Sustainable Architecture, 2011
It has become commonplace in architectural and urban literature to characterize indigenous vernac... more It has become commonplace in architectural and urban literature to characterize indigenous vernacular dwellings and settlements as sustainable. Yet, what are the actual limits of this conception when some of the world’s most serious environmental, social, economic and political problems center on traditional settlements today?
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Papers by Gabriel Arboleda
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