Transformaciones incrementales en la vivienda informal consolidada: El caso de Santa María de las Lomas, Guayaquil

The maximum impact that an architectural project can have in the social transformation of a neighborhood is not to change society through the project, but to make it possible for society to change through architecture. In the case of informal housing, this transformation occurs through small, incremental changes in each dwelling. These can be classified into three types: improvised, trial and error, and approximations, which give rise to logical global behaviors that can mean significant advances in the social structure of the neighborhood. This article presents progress of research carried out at the Catholic University of Santiago de Guayaquil, which seeks to find mutual influences between the physical transformations of the house, and the social transformation of the family in the informal neighborhood of Santa Maria de las Lomas, in Guayaquil. To this end, comparative diagrams of both transformation systems are produced, which describe a trigger for change that is neither architecture nor society, but rather a dialectic relationship between the two.