Events

Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series: María Carrizosa

Homes at Work: Urban Informality and Recognition in Latin America and Africa

This lecture will be in person and is part of the Fall 2024 Sciame Lecture Series, titled "Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited."

María Carrizosa is Associate Director for Global Housing Policy at Habitat for Humanity International. She holds a PhD in Public and Urban Policy, MA in Geography, MS in International Affairs and two Bachelor Degrees in Architecture and Philosophy. Her experience includes work at The New School, Slum Dwellers International, the Colombian government, and international organizations (IFC, UNDP, CAF, World Bank). She was adjunct professor at The New School and City College-CUNY between 2014 and 2023. Her publications include: Homes at Work (2023), Housing Policy in Latin America (2020), Urban Informality and the Making of African Cities (2022), and Kazakhstan’s Human Development Report (2019).

"Homes at Work": Housing is a means to achieve most other human rights. It is a condition to achieve wellbeing and welfare, directly contributing to the wealth of nations. But housing is more than that. This talk will explain how, because of the way housing is used (especially in informal settlements that make the bulk of the urban fabric in the global South), housing is also a public good. Despite not being accounted as such, the intense use of space within houses makes them a core component of the income, social protections, and urban services of neighborhoods, cities, and countries. This talk will walk the reader through the research in the book “Homes at Work” explaining how it came into being, describing the visual interviewing methodology it developed, and finally discussing what its findings mean for research, design, practice, and policy.

Suggested Reading: Carrizosa, María. (2023). No House is Just a House: House Interviews, Space-Use Intensity, and City-Making. Built Environment. 49. 440-463(24). 10.2148/benv.49.3.440. 

"Design Matters: The Housing Question Revisited" examines innovative solutions to the global housing crisis. It situates our contemporary dilemma in the powerful arguments made by Friedrich Engels in the 1870s and 1880s. In his revolutionary text, The Housing Question, Engels argued that the dearth of adequate shelter was an inevitable consequence of the Industrial Revolution. As a result of working-class exploitation endemic to capitalist modernity, the housing crisis was resolvable only by a revolutionary reconstruction of workers’ power that would result in the collective ownership of land and the means of production. “Design Matters” inverts Engels’s argument, putting design, architecture, and planning first. It expands his geographic, cultural, and temporal frame to include cities outside of Western Europe, and it probes places damaged by the devastating consequences of war, the climate emergency, and other catastrophes. A bevy of on-the-ground examples, conceived at multiple scales and aimed at reconstruction, are changing policy, politics, practice, and design. In the face of extraordinary challenges, architects, planners, and providers are collaborating to produce humane affordable solutions to the housing crisis, and suggesting that architecture is needed to provoke political change.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

This lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74, CEO of Sciame Construction.