Healthy housing, architectural design parameters covered by Latin American regulations

Abstract

The importance that health played in the genesis of modern architecture was subsequently frozen in a set of practices and regulations that have not been adequately reviewed. New evidence on the relationship of health and housing requires an effort to contrast architectural design practices with the health challenges posed by residential space. In this paper, standards from seven Latin American countries have been reviewed in the search for design requirements that promote healthy housing, even implicitly. The results reveal an encouraging picture: there is a wide coverage of topics with an impact on health, but they also point to certain shortcomings that need to be addressed. And although the comparison between the standards of the different countries provides good practices and possible learning, the main conclusion is that it would be essential to explicitly incorporate the objective of health as a key element in the production of housing.