For most of human history, before governments, developers or corporations built housing at scale — and before architects got involved — most people simply built homes for themselves.
Cassim Shepard. Photo: Courtesy CCNY.
This fundamental idea drives “Self-Help Housing: An Atlas of Agency,” a new digital research project by Cassim Shepard, distinguished lecturer at the Spitzer School of Architecture.
The online atlas documents a global movement of 20th-century housing efforts that handed power and responsibility back to residents. Through interactive mapping and historical storytelling, Shepard hopes to recenter how we think about housing today, not only as a product to be delivered to an end-user, but as a process to be shaped by the people who live in it.
“This project is one part of a broader research effort to trace an intellectual history of a particular approach to housing provision that was more prevalent in the 1970s — one that relied on residents to make decisions about their own housing and often to build it themselves.” Shepard told The RICC.
The idea shows up in South Asia, West Africa and Latin America in particular — and in different disciplines: architecture, international development and housing policy, Shepard said. He’s trying to connect the dots between these contexts, he said, to “tell the story of how this idea travelled between disciplines and between different geographic contexts.”
Finding case studies was one of the first challenges for the new project, which was awarded a $10,000 Independent Projects grant by the New York State Council on the Arts and the Architectural League of New York. Shepard is focused on three cities: Lima in Peru, Mumbai in India and New York City.
In Lima and Mumbai, he compares architecture-driven self-help efforts with those led by international development institutions like the World Bank. In New York, the focus is on a grassroots movement of tenants organizing to renovate and eventually take ownership of buildings abandoned by landlords — a movement that was inspired, in part, by self-help housing projects in the Global South.
The term “self-help housing” often evokes images of do-it-yourself construction or government subsidized housing that expects residents to build or customize their homes. Shepard’s research reframes that narrative.
“My research has shown that ‘self-building’ is nowhere near as important as ‘self-governing,’ and in the communities where this type of housing has evolved into thriving communities, it’s because of a culture of organizing and collective decision-making within them, not just DIY construction capacity,” Shepard said.
That emphasis away from construction skills towards community power runs throughout the project. The idea of “agency” is central to both the atlas and to his broader work as a writer, urbanist and educator.
Shepard’s research also uncovers how important and often overlooked thinkers from the 1960s and ‘70s believed in empowering residents to shape their own environments. Shepard thinks that participatory design is not just about customization, and emphasizes location.
The biggest decision people need to make about their housing is where they live. As 80 percent of the global population now lives in urban centers, and cities grow more crowded, projects are too often sited where land was cheapest, not where people had access to jobs, transportation or education.
“Self-built housing is not an end in itself if it does not empower people to make basic decisions about their housing — and to make them collectively,” Shepard said.
His project also asks how ideas travel, not just physically but intellectually. The project’s interactive documentary will allow users to explore housing sites across time and geography, tracing how models pioneered in the Global South were reinterpreted, institutionalized or erased in different contexts. The project will draw from some 10,000 “sites and services” projects the World Bank once funded and map how the cities looked when the projects started and how they look now after the surrounding urban fabric grew around them.
Though the atlas began with Shepard’s research, the vision is collaborative. Eventually, he hopes it becomes a platform that other scholars, students or residents can contribute to.
That future-focused impulse also shapes his teaching at Spitzer. Teaching in an architecture school, where many of his students are preparing for careers in design or planning, has deepened his commitment to exposing those in his classroom to the political and social contexts in which buildings are made, and managed over time.
Self-help housing is often associated primarily with the Global South or with earlier eras of development, but Shepard sees it as highly relevant to today’s housing debates, especially in cities like New York.
A group of neighbors today might not construct an apartment tower on their own. However, they absolutely have the political skill to organize and make decisions — a truth that in Shepard’s eyes is sorely lacking in contemporary debates about affordable housing.
In a time of explosive urbanization and the accompanying housing challenges, the project offers more than just a history lesson. It is a provocation. What if the solution to housing isn’t just better policy, faster development or streamlined financing, but developing deeper trust in the people who already live there?
Judah is a senior at CUNY Baruch College, pursuing a major in journalism and minors in computer science and environmental sustainability. He is also the business editor for Baruch’s independent student newspaper, The Ticker, and co-managing editor for the Baruch Journalism Department’s magazine Dollars & Sense.