Small-scale Bioclimatic Prosthesis: A strategy for adaptive social housing based on local spontaneous and socio-environmental patterns in transitional spaces

Learning from the spaces residents already transform

In this publication, we propose a small-scale strategy for improving social housing in Latin American contexts where residents already adapt their homes in response to climate, family life and limited resources. Millions of existing dwellings could be improved, while energy poverty and poor indoor comfort remain urgent. Rather than starting with costly, comprehensive rebuilding, we focus on the spaces between inside and outside: balconies, porches, thresholds, patios and other transitional areas where everyday domestic life often expands.

These are not left-over spaces. They affect comfort, energy demand, privacy, social contact and the relationship between the household and the street. They are also where residents commonly add shade, enclosure, planting, seating or storage in response to immediate needs. We treat that practical knowledge as a resource for design rather than an informal problem to remove.

A prosthesis for the existing home

Our central idea is a ‘small-scale bioclimatic prosthesis’: a flexible, low-cost set of components that can be combined with what is already there. Like a prosthesis, it extends the capacity of an existing structure rather than replacing it. The interventions combine environmental and spatial functions, offering ways to improve thermal conditions and daily usability through elements residents can understand, appropriate and potentially help build.

The approach is rooted in local social and environmental patterns. Bioclimatic performance is never just a generic technical recipe; it depends on sun, shade, ventilation, climate, construction practice and the way a household uses space. By working with those conditions, small interventions can create better boundaries between public and private life, improve indoor-outdoor comfort and allow a home to change as household needs change.

We see this as an alternative to one-size-fits-all rehabilitation. In places where large-scale renovation is unrealistic, affordable and replicable systems that can grow incrementally are especially valuable. Adaptive social housing should not force people into fixed ways of living. It should give them useful capacity to improve the homes they already inhabit. The bioclimatic prosthesis is therefore both a design strategy and a social proposition: sustainable upgrading becomes more possible when it grows from the lived patterns and skills of local communities.