Low Budget Living

The ever growing demand for low-cost housing rises some fundamental challenges to housing design. Low-cost building is usually considered as a matter of building cheaply, often forgetting the crucial questions expressed after the environmental and economic crisis, like the energy cost reduction and the value of the dwelling as a space where new lifestyles related to the fast social evolution of the past decades could be developed. Cost reduction alone cannot produce new lifestyles, as the history of social housing confirms. The bare optimization of building techniques under a deterministic point of view often produced a depleted spatiality, not only in interiors but also in urban spaces, failing to develop alternative ways of living the city.