Incremental Design Toolkit for the progressive expansion of social housing in Agadez, Niger: Enhancing thermal behaviour through passive bioclimatic strategies.

500 houses were built in Agadez, Niger as part of the project Urbanisation for Change developed by the Comitato Internazionale per lo Sviluppo dei Popoli (CISP) with the collaboration of Politecnico di Torino, and funded by the Italian Agency for Development Cooperation (AICS), the European Union and UNESCO. The project aimed to address the housing deficit of the city, however, it is likely that the households will need to expand the initial house due to the size of the building and the changing spatial needs of a household, since the house cannot be considered as a static finished product but as a living element which is constantly changing and transforming over time in response to household’s needs. Therefore, this thesis will seek to develop an incremental design toolkit to be implemented in the Urbanisation for Change houses that were built, which in the future will assist the households in taking appropriate decisions during their incremental process, according to their needs and resources. The incremental design toolkit is based in the research of incremental housing and a qualitative approach analysis which takes into account the cultural adequacy, the building technology and environmental sustainability. Furthermore, the environmental sustainability is complemented by a quantitative approach analysis, where a validated digital model is made to obtain reliable results of thermal behavior simulations.