CINVA to Siyabuswa: the unruly path of global self-help housing

Abstract

In a pilot project for the future Bantustan capital of Siyabuswa, the South African apartheid-era state funded the research and construction of fifty-nine core houses from 1977 to 1978 before throttling the full scheme. Designed within the National Building Research Institute by Argentinian emigré architect Jorge Luis Arrigone, the project was an early attempt to introduce El Centro Interamericano de Vivienda y Planeamiento (Inter-American Housing and Planning Centre or CINVA) and United Nations orthodoxies of self-help housing to support displaced rural communities. Siyabuswa project’s appearance and repression prompt new forms of assessment of the roles played in global architecture at the peripheries of the Global South.

Keywords

• social housing
• mutual aid
• apartheid
• cold war
• architecture
• core units