Modern methods of construction for the social good: An investigation of technological adoption for prefabricated tiny house communities in Izmir, Türkiye

Housing design in informal settlements have long fascinated the architectural design community. Material precarity, marginalisation, and ‘self-grown’ neighbourhoods have become a rich ground for spatial and material experimentation outside the (stricter) boundaries of client-based professional activity. These design experiments frequently produce industrial and architectural design solutions that are disconnected from the communities and environments they are expected to serve in the first place - market of pop-up structures, tent-like pods, and flat-pack modules - which fail to consider local environmental and spatial conditions, such as place-based attachments, social and familial structures, or home/domestic cultures.

This paper reports on a research collaboration exploring an alternative approach: instead of designing ready-made “solutions” to informal housing challenges, a partnership between the University of Plymouth (UOP) in the United Kingdom and Yasar University (YU) in Türkiye is scoping the adoption of modern methods of construction (MMC) for tiny-house communities in the outskirts of Izmir, Türkiye. Partially triggered by the lack of affordable housing after the 2020 Samos Earthquake, the rise of these communities is driven by legal loopholes in local zoning regulations. Constant bypassing has led to semi-legal houses that, while affordable, pose safety, and long-term sustainability issues including poor building performance, poor planning and inadequate urban infrastructure.

In that context, our collaboration explores place-based conditions of architectural production, and propose that the adoption of MMC can serve not only as a mechanism for better, more affordable, and healthier housing delivery, but more widely contribute to local and low-carbon material supply chains, the growth of local employability skills and digital competencies within the local community, and help to address digital inequity by empowering marginalised communities through the benefits of digital technologies. In doing so, this paper expands on the notion of MMC for social good and details the applicability of this approach in the context of tiny house communities in Izmir alongside related challenge areas around policy, the environment, and local economy.