Resilience in social housing developments through post-occupancy evaluation and co-production

The poor initial resilience of the ground-breaking Brazilian urban social housing programme ‘Minha Casa, Minha Vida’(MCMV) affects millions of people, who have tried to adapt their homes, survived the unexpected and have to reinvent themselves constantly. This study delimits the elements that compose the concept of resilience, namely: the impacts, vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities that characterize the resilience of the built environment in the case study selected. To achieve these aims, advanced Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) and Co-production techniques have been applied in the case study of a typical Brazilian MCMV development in Uberlandia (Brazil). The results highlighted factors going beyond the typical vulnerabilities already seen in most of these developments. They pointed out the adaptive recovery capacities as key factors for resilience. This case study provides the means to investigate resilience and its variables in depth within the specific context of MCMV’s social housing, subsidising designers and public policies makers in the elaboration of more resilient projects for these social housing communities.