Self-help housing breeds no contempt : architecture, women, agency and the transformation of Masese Women's Self-Help Housing Project in Jinja, Uganda

Abstract

In what ways can an architectural researcher explore low-cost housing (as discourse and practice) without taking away the power and privileges which women landlords in Masese Women’s Self-help Housing Project (MWSHP) enjoy in line with the tenurial security emphasised in the 1995 Constitution of Uganda, the National Shelter Strategy (1989), the National Housing Policy (2016), the gender policy and the other laws of Uganda. Being a woman, an architect and a researcher, this is approached this question from Hélène Frichot’s proposition that “feminist work crafts a different kind of architecture” and a traditional proverb that states that self-help housing breeds no contempt, to find an appropriate position for this study. The study was premised on the conviction that self-help housing is an effort made by household members concerning the planning, financing and construction of their housing, to explore MWSHP in Jinja, Uganda. The study acknowledges the current literature and scholarship which conceives MWSHP as a mass-housing project for women established in 1989 and has morphed into a project in which women have modified their houses to suit their needs. The study, however, moved beyond typo morphologies, morphological analyses, formalist analyses and Eurocentric modernist approaches to architecture inspired by Uganda’s colonial past, to interrogate the historical contexts and precedents for spatialised power reproduced in Jinja as an urban space in Uganda. It explored the question of how they implicate women’s agency in MWSHP. By using a combined research design based on multiple methods drawn from diverse traditions involving historical research and qualitative research designs, and an architectural phenomenological approach, linked history, theory and practice to improve the methodology for my creative practice. It also used them to collect, interpret and analyse empirical data, and write this thesis. It conjoined my doing and thinking as it developed and linked the different concepts used in this study. The study took an emancipationist position and approached built space as theory, context and history; and engaged the notions of spatial agency, building-while-in-it, inter-disciplinarily, inter-sectionality, reflexivity, heterotopia, space as power and resistance. This was to explore the power and privileges women in MWSHP enjoy as landlords who build the houses they own and dwell in. The study thus demonstrates and argues that the context in which widowhood and prostitution/prostitute have gained new meanings and women landlords in MWSHP have used built space as a form of resistance – a counter-space – and where they have defended their access to, and possession of, housing while transforming the houses given to them by DANIDA and the Government of Uganda. Thus, contributing to the discourse on gender, architecture and women’s agency in Uganda.