The City Lived - 'Sites-and-Services'

This housing strategy consisted of providing ‘sites’ – plots of land to construct dwellings on – in combination with a set of ‘services’, ranging from infrastructural features, such as sewerage and waste disposal, to market-based interventions that aimed to make cheap building material more easily accessible, or financial loan schemes that offered inhabitants the means to invest in their homes. It often operated on a large scale, and targeted thousands of households in a single project. For several decades from the 1970s, it was heavily endorsed by major actors such as the World Bank and the United Nations as a cost-efficient way to meet the most basic housing needs of a high number of people, whilst simultaneously offering authorities the means to direct the enormous growth of spontaneous settlements in the urban peripheries as part of their broader urban development plans. As such, these sites-and-services schemes have left a major imprint on many cities in the Global South. Despite this impact, however, their histories are not well documented.

The seminar course is co-tutored by Dr. Sebastiaan Loosen and Lahbib El Moumni, with guest lectures by Konstantina Kalfa and Karim Rouissi.

The course is based on weekly two-hour seminars, consisting of lectures, text discussions, and workshops, in combination with student-led case study analysis in small groups. It is a 4-credit elective course open to Master’s and Bachelor’s students from their 3rd semester onwards. For more information on the course, please consult ETH’s course catalogue.

An online exhibition based on earlier student work can be consulted here.