User:FreyaCandel/C-re-aid

C-re-aid Change REsearch Architecture Innovation Design is a Tanzanian and Belgian registered non profit organization, active since 2012, that explores the possibilities of architecture within the goal of poverty reduction. This research is conducted by means of design, fieldwork, construction, empowering local craftsmen and receiving students of architecture and engineering.

Founder
FREYA CANDEL was born in Brussels in 1984. She received her Master of Architecture in 2008 from Sint Lucas Brussels after she spend 7 months in Tokyo with a scholarship from the University of Tokyo. Following to this experience her master thesis became "Open space by development in Tokyo". To gain more experience, she worked as an architect in an office in Amsterdam in 2009. For the first time she practiced her job and she started to ask herself some questions about architecture and the role of the architect. Beginning of 2010 she arrived in East-Africa, were a journey of experiences in architecture began. Volunteer work and her work at PLOT.form as co-founder gave her the inspiration needed to found the non-profit organisation C-re-aid. In 2014 she received her advanced Master of Science in Cultures and Development Studies. During these studies she found her passion for Social science and was able to write her experiences down in several papers. The paper Informal Economy in Informal Settlements was presented on the conference Creative adjacencie in Ghent. In her thesis "Possibilities of Architecture" she evaluates the projects of C-re-aid conducted in 2013. She has over 6 years experience in architecture, housing and research in a developing country and specifies her focus on "housing for the poor". In 2014, over 10 projects have been conducted.

Values
People living in poverty find themselves in vulnerable positions. C-re-aid believes that causes of chronic poverty cannot be seen as strictly material conditions, but are heavily influenced by social conditions. "Material" is more complex than just an abstraction and cannot be seen out of its social context. As an architectural organization we concentrate on housing in informal settlements. The house carries social meaning with it and is a crucial asset in the lives of people. C-re-aid focuses on architecture as a source of social transformation in order to tackle chronic poverty. We collaborate on projects with families of various backgrounds, social relations and material possessions. However, the crucial similarity is that all the families received assistance from C-re-aid to make a specific change. Thus, while the projects themselves are different, their common baseline is the research to the reception of that change.

Partners
To date, C-re-aid has worked with students from Belgian Universities including Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KUL), Provinciale Hogeschool Limburg (PHL), Sint- Lucas Brussels and Ghent (LUCA), University of Gent (Ugent) and University of Antwerp (Uantwerp). In Tanzania, C-re-aid has successful partnerships with several NGO´s as Ft Kilimanjaro, Anza , Minjeni women´s group and Tatu project.