Social Inclusion: A proposal from the University of Guayaquil to design popular housing with citizen participation

One of the main factors affecting the acceptance of social housing projects is the non-participation of users in their building's design. The VIS Project breaks with this idealistic scheme of unilateral projection and proposes a concurrent engineering where citizen participation is taken into account in the collection of statistical data and also in its idiosyncrasy, ancestral values and life models. The Quality Function Deployment is one of the methodologies that are implemented in addition to bioclimatic design with passive cooling and solar control strategies. The multidisciplinary team made up of engineers, architects and interior and industrial designers together with students of Architecture and Interior Design careers of the School of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Guayaquil have managed to bring to low-income sectors practical solutions to self-build dwellings problems. The procedures and methods applied are adapted to the particular case of each user, giving particular solutions analyzed under multiple criteria.