DESIGN AND ASSESSMENT OF COST ALTERNATIVES OF STAGED LOW-COST HOUSING

The concept of ″staged″ housing is advanced which is based on the ″support-infill″ methodology, developed by the Stichting Architecten Research Group in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. Apart from providing a methodology for the analysis, design and evaluation of alternative plan variations for a given configuration and basic ″support″ elements, the methodology also allows for the staged selection of secondary ″infill″ elements on the basis of their functional and construction criteria, based on the capacity of a given basic ″support″ to accommodate ″catalogues″ of secondary elements to satisfy the layout variations in terms of predetermined criteria of positional and dimensional ″agreements″ . Once the capacity of a given ″support″ is known in terms of the number of possible dwelling layout variations, it is possible to establish rational tradeoffs in terms of their cost for selected user categories and/or income groups.