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From the habitational solutions to the habitat as a social construction.
From the right to housing, to the right to live! Carles Llop Torné1
The logics of the 0ikos or for an ecology of living. A starting point to focus the question of sustainability, on the subject of the habitat. I would like to place properly, from my point of view, the theme that approaches this summary of reflections on sustainable housing. The environmental sustainability is clearly based on the reduction of the consumption of resources and energies necessary for the new productions of habitats; in the reuse of the existing patrimony before the generation of new stocks, and the permanent recycling of materials and of resources before producing new. I would like to to affirm that, from this perspective, the production of new habitats -stricto sensu- can never go in favor of the sustainability because it always presuposes the reduction in environmental patrimony. However, if we consider the factors of cultural quality that incorporates any constructive action: the infrastructuring of the territory, the construction of new architectures; the production of housing is also necessary to understand it as a generation of new resources (artificial but necessary) for the human life. It is from this perspective, eco-centered around the man, where it makes sense to approach/tackle the fascinating challenge of contributing to the habitability of the persons. The production of housings, to give answer to the basic right (but not attained)
of
housing for any citizen, for his/her family and for his/her
community, is systematically perverted when it is only approached as a quantitative subject. Housing as a product of consumption, marketized and reduced to the expression of a space between walls, an object trivialized and an alienator of the consumer society. In this, the daily life and their needs lose their axiological value, determining of the meaning and the form of the home, to cause a popularized constructe that even takes other names, curiously an expression of a mutilated house (the “flat”, the 'ceiling' of the habitacionals solutions of the countries in development to quote some evident enough...). The diabolical words and significance that man has used for naming a house ('Cuarto', I 'Piso', 'Techo'...) identify clearly how, and up to what levels, its meaning has been eventually perverted. The 'sustainable habitats to live-in ', are a different thing alltogether. In thinking, producing and using them,
one not only searches not to generate wastes nor to waste the natural
capita, but instead looks for the added value with the increase of the cultural capital that means to create efficient housing, functional, comfortable and beautiful, looking both at the
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This article contains contributions that have been elaborated together with the partners of JLParquitectes: Sebastià Jornet, Joan Enric Pastor