Housing

Why a slum house is like a factory

by David Week on 26 May 2011

Commenting on my post on the $300 house, Yodan said: And yet, David, it seems that in every advanced economy housing does become a commodity and is predominantly produced by big companies, and financed by big banks and savings and loans societies, and that is usually connected with levels of poverty going down significantly. In [...]

Critique of the $300 house

by David Week on 10 May 2011

In the 30th April issue of “the capitalists’ bible”, The Economist, I read that: …Vijay Govindarajan, of Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, along with Christian Sarkar, a marketing expert, issued a challenge in a Harvard Business Review blog: why not apply the world’s best business thinking to housing the poor? His idea is to [...]

The realities of resettlement after disaster

by David Week 12 January 2011

“Blaming” the government of Haiti My antennae perked up when I saw this flick by on twitter: Why Haiti is still such a mess a full year after the quake and who’s to blame: http://ow.ly/3Cc1g The reference is to a post by an Australian NGO, ActionAid. The post begins like this: Tomorrow marks the one-year [...]

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Crossing the Streams

by David Week 12 December 2010

In “Aid as a conversation between cultures”, I recounted my early experiences in understanding aid as a two-way exchange, rather than a one-way flow. This paper, from 1993, was my first attempt, together with Howard Davis, to put that understanding in writing. On re-reading, I now see this paper as representing an important first step: [...]

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Aid as a conversation between cultures

by David Week 12 December 2010

A few days ago, I posted this statement on twitter: “In my ideal world, aid is a conversation between cultures, on the subject of human development in both cultures.” A few of my fellow twitterers picked up on this idea: @debelzie @BonnieKoenig @meowtree @Ethnicsupplies @warisara @idealistnyc One exchange that stays in mind was this: @idealistnyc [...]

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Five principles of lean building design

by David Week 28 September 2010

This is a short paper which has been presented in a number of contexts. It started life at the RAIA National Housing Convention, Adelaide 2001 as “Thinking Lean”. This was republished in the South Australian Architect in February 2002. Finally, in 2007 I used it as the basis for a presentation at the Teaching in Architecture Conference, Donau-Universität Krems, [...]

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About “Architecture for Development”

by David Week 27 April 2010

Why this blog Below, I’ve pasted my professional “about” blurb from my CV, written in some version of bureaucratese. It serves as a potted history of my professional life, and provides some insight, I guess, into my professional persona. But I’m not blogging to further my professional career, which is doing just fine. Here are [...]

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