Summary

This paper examines the concept of “community development” in the construction of single-family homes in former Portuguese colonial territories in Africa during the Cold War to gain insight into the strategies of self-production housing. It traces a narrative of the colonial building sites of these residential landscapes through three processes of optimization: how technicians described the core tasks of domestic-scale works, identifying local agents with the “right skills”; how they tested the capacity for self-construction; how they managed the interplay between local labor, traditional techniques and industrialized materials. Finally, the paper questions how the building sites’ dynamics impacted project design.

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