Numerous public housing projects around the world have been constructed under the premise that housing recipients can be empowered by using their ingenuity, improvisation, labor, and capital investments to incrementally complete their housing units according to their own means, tastes, and aspirations. Often labeled as “not-yet houses,” “half-houses,” “expandable houses,” or “starter houses,” these incomplete housing designs and prototypes formalize the “unfinished” as a space of experimentation and speculation with new urban models and building systems, while often relying heavily on residents’ labor, time, and capital to complete their skeleton structures (Muzaffar 2024, Van Noorloos et al. 2019). This celebration of residents’ resourcefulness and improvisation is often a common, highly mediatized narrative among development actors, architects, and scholars. In this paper, I critically interrogate this narrative.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic dissertation research in Cape Town, the paper examines two low-income housing projects in Khayelitsha, one proposed and one prototyped, that purposefully designed unfinished structures. By situating these projects within their developmental politics and broader architectural histories of incremental building, the paper focuses on how architects, residents, and other experts and critics differently imagine and interpret unfinished housing designs. Promoting values such as flexibility, adaptability, and incrementality, these incomplete designs can potentially foster creative self-empowerment, yet also risk becoming burdensome impositions in the guise grow-your-own-house logics. Exploring the blurred horizons between what counts as “finished” and “unfinished,” “formal” and “informal,” the paper discusses the contested politics of incompletion, showing how incremental housing becomes both a testing ground for residents’ ingenuity and a potential vehicle for neoliberal and developmental design agendas.
