Abstract:
Over the last 30 years, many countries in Asia,
Africa, and Latin America have experienced a
strong expansion of their urban economy,
irreversible changes to their rural economy,
an increase in urban land values, internal
migration, and the urbanization of the poor.
Today, in many large cities of the region,
these factors have facilitated and intensified
the fragmentation of construction activity into
almost separate spheres of production, with
little or no reciprocal connections in training,
know-how, and career-development paths,
and consequent limitations in cross-system
application of technology transfer.
In such context, the discursive references of
vernacular to create technically and culturally
exclusive niche markets for architectural
production could only reinforce the crossmarket
compartmentalization of building
knowledge, and the subsequent inability of
architecture to engage in social building
production activities. Instead, this paper
looks at the vernacular from a labour policy-making
point of view, that is to integrate its
'on-the-job' training conceptions within a
design and technological vocabulary that
envisages real building projects as training
grounds, thereby projecting the latter as a
vehicle through which labour development
opportunities are created and linked.
