3D Home Printing Landmark: 10 Houses in a Day

The global South is experiencing urban growth on a scale unprecedented in human history, far outstripping the great urbanization wave that swept across Europe and North America during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Faced with growth at this pace, governments – both national and local – often become overwhelmed by the rate of change and find it difficult to cope. One of the most common complaints urban-dwellers around the world have is about their living conditions. Even in developed countries, creating enough housing to match demand can be a struggle.

Quality housing is crucial to human development and quality of life. Adequate living space and access to running water make a significant contribution to people’s health and well-being. Despite this obvious conclusion, millions of urban dwellers live in squalid conditions with poor sanitation, overcrowding, crime, pollution, noise and a general feeling of insecurity. Insecure people find it difficult to access stable jobs and suffer stigma for living in poor-quality neighbourhoods.

But many initiatives are seeking to speed up the pace of home construction.

These include the Moladi construction system from South Africa (moladi.net). Moladi uses moulds to assemble houses, so that the building skills required are minimal and easily learned. Built to a template that has been tested for structural soundness and using a design that produces a high-quality home both in structure and appearance, the Moladi system seeks to provide an alternative to makeshift homes that are structurally unsound and vulnerable to fires, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

Another clever approach is a home and dwelling assembly system developed by architect Teddy Cruz (http://estudioteddycruz.com) (http://visarts.ucsd.edu/faculty/teddy-cruz) that allows slum dwellers to gradually construct a building in stages as they can afford it. It is earthquake-safe and fire resistant.

Another approach turns to the fast-growing technology of 3D printing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3D_printing). This technology has gone mainstream in the past five years in the form of desktop-sized 3D printers, or fabricators as they are sometimes called. The machines assemble objects in an additive fashion – layer-by-layer – using digital designs from a computer.

3D printers can make a complex object without having to resort to mass manufacturing. An accurate, one-off object can be created with the same precision as a machined object. Architects, for example, use the technology to make 3D models of their designs. And now a company in China is hoping to use 3D printers to make houses.

The WinSun Decoration Design Engineering Co. (http://www.yhbm.com/index.aspx) 3D printed 10 houses in 24 hours in Shanghai’s Qinpu district, reported Business Insider.

This landmark achievement was accomplished with a giant printer – 152 meters long, 10 meters wide, and 6 meters high – which manufactured walls for the house from a mix of construction waste and cement.

As a sign of the confidence the company has in the innovative construction technique, it built its own 10,000 square meter headquarters in one month using the same materials. The company’s chief executive officer, Ma Yihe, is also the inventor of the technique. It is a very flexible technology and the material can be tinted different colors according to the customer’s wishes. It is cheap to work with and is also less draining on environmental resources than traditional building materials.

The 10 houses consist of two concrete side supporting walls with glass panels at the front and back and with a triangle roof. They will be used as offices at a high-tech industrial park in Shanghai. The company has big plans, hoping to use the technology to build more homes – and even skyscrapers.

Competition is heating up as people around the world seek to perfect 3D technology to print houses to meet the growing demand for dwellings.

In The Netherlands, Dutch architectural firm Dus Architects (dusarchitects.com)  commissioned the development of a leviathan 3D printer so it could print entire rooms. Modeled on a much smaller home desktop version, the Ultimaker (ultimaker.com), this printer creates whole rooms that are then assembled into custom-built houses.

The 6-meter high KamerMaker (kamermaker.com), or “room builder”, is being used in Amsterdam to build a full-size house.

The project is called “3D Print Canal House” (http://3dprintcanalhouse.com/). The printer assembles the rooms individually, and then they are snapped together to make a house. The internal structure of the building blocks are in a honey-comb pattern, which is then filled with a foam that becomes as hard as concrete.

“For the first time in history, over half of the world’s population is living in cities,” Dus Architects founder Hans Vermeulen told cnet.com. “We need a rapid building technique to keep up the pace with the growth of the megacities. And we think 3D printing can be that technique.

“We bought a container from the Internet and we transformed it into one of the biggest printers on this planet.”

This technology can also easily use recycled waste materials and lower the pollution and cost of moving building materials around. The Dus Architects prototype house is expected to take three years to complete (so, still in its early development phase) and will look like a typical Dutch canal house with a pointy, gabled roof (http://www.build.com.au/gabled-roof).

One of the pioneering advocates for using 3D technology to address the global South’s urbanization and housing challenge has been Larry Sass, director of the Digital Design Fabrication Group (http://ddf.mit.edu/) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Three technologies have been developed at MIT since the 1950s that have made digital fabrication possible – computer numerical control (CNC), which enables computers to control machines; computer-aided design software in the 1960s; and 3D printing in the 1980s to make solid models using digital designs.

Sass told MIT’s Spectrum newsletter (spectrum.mit.edu) that large-scale 3D printing would mean “buildings will rise faster, use fewer resources, cost less, and be more delightful to the eye than ever before.”

He envisions a future in which architects will be able to send their designs by computer to a 3D printer and it will then be able to start “printing” the building or a house accurately according to the original designs.

The conventional way of making buildings has been stuck in the same approach since the 1800s, according to Sass. It uses highly skilled and extensive labour, it is slow and plagued by weather disruptions and urban congestion, and it is expensive, often using materials brought from far away.

Digitally fabricating buildings takes a radically different approach: the building is made in a series of precision-cut, interlocking parts and then assembled on site like a jigsaw puzzle.

“It’s the right delivery system for the developing world, because the developing world doesn’t have an infrastructure of tools, air guns, saws and power,” Sass said.

“Design and high-quality construction is mostly for the rich,” added Sass, who was raised in Harlem, a New York City neighbourhood with high poverty levels. “I’ve always wanted to figure out how to bring design choice and architectural delight to the poor.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: July 2014

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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Housing Innovation in South’s Urban Areas

 

As urban populations around the South increase, the quality of city housing will be critical to the quality of life and sustainability of improvements to living standards.

Living in crowded and chaotic urban and semi-urban areas does not have to mean suffering poor quality housing. A variety of Southern architects are showing how new perspectives on common problems like cramped spaces, traffic noise, minimal green spaces and tight budgets can be addressed with clever thinking and new concepts.

The bustling and crowded Brazilian city of Sao Paulo has evolved in a chaotic fashion over the years. As Brazilian photographer Reinaldo Coser admitted to design and architecture magazine Dwell (www.dwell.com) , in many places it is “very ugly.”

Sao Paulo suffers from the downside of rapid urban and semi-urban development familiar to cities across the South: traffic gridlock, pollution, noise. It’s a toxic combination of factors that turns even simple tasks like buying groceries into depressingly long, stressful ordeals.

Coser’s family home sits a couple hundred metres from the congested Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenida_Brigadeiro_Faria_Lima) , the city’s unofficial main street. Yet the dwelling has been cleverly designed to make living in the centre of this modern urban hurly burly a peaceful and calming oasis. Designed by Brazilian architects Studio MK27 (http://www.marciokogan.com.br) – and in keeping with the rich Brazilian modernist tradition pioneered by Oscar Niemeyer in the country’s capital, Brasilia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia) – the home uses clever techniques to build calm into chaos.

The front and back gardens are level with the living room, creating an enormous living space that seamlessly flows from indoor to outdoor space. By using a large overhang over the gardens, even on rainy days the home can be lived in almost without walls.

Furniture in the home draws on Brazilian designers like Sergio Rodrigues (http://www.sergiorodrigues.com.br).

One of several innovative Brazilian firms, Studio MK27 was founded in the 1980s by Marcio Kogan. It has 12 architects from around the world collaborating on projects.

With a metropolitan population of around 20 million, Sao Paulo (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A3o_Paulo) is the most populous city in the Americas, and in the Southern hemisphere.

While it is easy to point out the downsides of rapid and chaotic urban development, Coser, a professional photographer, lives and loves Sao Paulo nonetheless because, like so many cities across the South, it is a vibrant and dynamic place to be.

And by choosing a design for his home that is calming, he has been able to introduce balance into his family’s life while benefiting from the economic opportunities of the city.

“This house has actually changed the rhythm of our lives,” he told Dwell. “We eat at home more. We go to bed earlier. We wake up earlier. We sleep more.”

And how has the calm helped his two daughters? One is able to play without disturbing the neighbours, and the other can quietly study her books, which was difficult when the family lived in the noise and buzz of a small two-bedroom apartment.

And – something often overlooked in development plans cooked up by economists and urban planners – the aesthetics of the house are very appealing. “Our house is so pretty,” says his wife, Sophia. “Sometimes I like to just look at it for a long time.”

This calm home was created out of basic need. The family needed more space with a second daughter on the way, and had become frustrated with the congestion of the city and the lack of green space. Architect Marcio Kogan was consulted for a solution.

“We wanted a place where we could just shut the door and travel,” says Reinaldo.

The house is made from raw concrete and a cheap-but-tough local wood called cumaru (http://tinyurl.com/3y8kh8v) . By using inexpensive and low maintenance materials, the home is able to weather the environmental stresses of a polluted, tropical city with harsh sunshine.

Kogan deployed his previous experience as a filmmaker to make the home feel and look more spacious and open than it is. He calls it “looking at the world through a wide-screen lens.” The design of the home is seen as a “narrative”, leading the occupant from the garden to the living room, up the stairs, past bedrooms to a rooftop deck with panoramic views of the city.

Another innovative solution in Sao Paulo is USINA (http://www.usinactah.org.br) – a finalist for the World Habitat Awards (http://www.worldhabitatawards.org/about/?lang=00) – which brings people together to build high-density urban housing. It has aided more than 5,000 people to build with their own labour multi-storey buildings. These new apartments are not isolated from other services, but come with community facilities, childcare facilities, professional training courses and other employment-generating activities.

It is estimated up to 15 percent of the city’s population live in slums. This community organising approach is in contrast to the existing ad-hoc building of homes in the slums – often with no technical assistance – or public housing projects built by developers looking for quick profits while ignoring quality and services. USINA’s approach has led to Sao Paulo being a pioneer in participatory housing policies.

USINA provides the technical assistance to social movements looking to build housing for the poor. The cost for the buildings is borne by a combination of public funding and the labour of the residents (working 16 hours per week per household). The cost per housing unit tends to be between US $12,000 and US $15,000 (with land usually donated free by public authorities).

Architectural innovation is also underway in Indonesia, another country that has experienced spurts of rapid economic growth and urbanization, and where a growing middle class is demanding a higher quality of life.

The country’s capital, Jakarta (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jakarta) , with a population over 8 million, is a mixed bag of modern skyscrapers, crumbling colonial architecture, suburbs and slums.

In the Jakarta suburb of Bekasi (population more than 2 million), Nugrohu Wisnu was looking for a little more space for his family.

At first, the family encountered the downside of poorly designed housing. They bought a house which was infested with termites and was uncomfortable to live in. Frustrated, they began shopping around for something better. And they turned to Indonesian architects Djuhara + Djuhara (http://djuhara.com/home.html).

“We thought that an all-steel house like the one that Mr. Djuhara had built just down the road would be termite resistant,” Wisnu told Dwell.

Djuhara is a high-profile architect and chair of the Jakarta chapter of the Indonesian Institute of Architects (http://www.iai.or.id) and helped to modernize the city’s planning regulations.

The stereotype of young Indonesian architects is that they only work on luxury hotels. But Djuhara was designing and building suburban homes and this grabbed Wisnu’s attention.

Also against stereotype, Djuhara was actually attracted by a tight budget and the small space for the house. In a crowded city, using every bit of space efficiently is critical. The existing house was torn down and Djuhara set about building a new home. The majority of the building materials were sourced within the immediate area: an easy thing to do in Jakarta since there are many vendors selling building supplies on the streets.

By buying local like this, shipping costs were eliminated from the cost of the house. The home’s cost, US $20,000, is just 2/3 of what a more conventional Indonesian home would cost.

Djuhara revelled in the job: “Ad-hocism is my religion,” he told Dwell.

The split-level design of the home uses the space well. The kitchen opens up into the garden.

“Family breakfasts are great in here,” says Wisnu. “And the open kitchen encourages the kids to head out into the garden and run and play.”

There is also a strong environmental component to the design. Airflow cavities in the ceiling are used in the bedrooms to cool them. The house also uses heavy wooden shutters to keep the house cool during the day: “The shutters are unusual, but they are thick and sturdy,” Wisnu explains.

“They really shade the master bedroom to the extent that it feels mellow and cool. They let us reduce our air-conditioning consumption, even during the height of the day.”

And Djuhara also has another difference from many other architects: he refuses to patent his design.

“My friends have asked me why I don’t patent my low-cost houses,” he explains, “but they completely miss the point. I actually want my designs to be copied. I want Indonesian society to rethink its attitudes towards urban architecture.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: June 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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Housing Solution for World’s Growing Urban Population

 

Across the South, cities are expanding and urban populations growing at a phenomenal rate — the cities of Africa and Asia are growing by a million people a week. Megacities and sprawling slums will be the hallmarks of this majority urban world. In sub-Saharan Africa, 72 percent of the population already lives in slum conditions.

How people will be housed is an urgent problem. There are many ways to build a dwelling, from scavenged materials, to labour-intensive and expensive custom-built construction, yet affordable and safe construction techniques for the poor are sorely needed.

The danger of building unsafe housing can be seen in the recent devastating earthquake in Haiti, where many buildings collapsed, killing an estimated 212,000 people. If the rapid growth in urban populations is to be safe and sustainable, then new dwellings will need to be built that meet high standards of durability.

In South Africa, one company believes it has the right technology for an age of rapid urban population growth and the need for quick and safe housing construction.

The Moladi building system (http://moladi.com/) (http://www.moladi.net/default.aspx?AspxAutoDetectCookieSupport=1) developed in 1986 by South African injection mold maker Hennie Botes consists of molded plastic panels, looking like the panels found in children’s construction toys that are screwed together and assembled as a frame for the building. With the frame in place, a concrete mortar mix is poured in and left to dry: depending on local conditions, taking between 12 and 15 hours. When dry, the plastic mold is removed and a fully built house is the result. Because of the use of molds, the home’s walls are smooth and even and the resulting home is tidy to look at.

Moladi doesn’t require professional builders to assemble the frames, and the technique has been tested for strength and for resistance to earthquakes and hurricanes. Since it was developed specifically for the poor, this building method draws on what is called ‘sweat equity’: often the only asset a poor person has to contribute to the cost of building a home is their free labour.

Because the dimensions of the home have already been established when the plastic frames were molded, common on-site mistakes are avoided.

Moladi benefits from South Africa’s Black Economic Empowerment programme (http://www.southafrica.info/business/trends/empowerment/bee.htm) and is certified for its quality with the South African Bureau of Standards (SABS) (https://www.sabs.co.za/). Moladi contractors and developers are working in 15 countries and the technique is distributed in a further seven countries.

The Moladi construction technique was born of frustration with the traditional approach of laying one brick on top of another. This traditional construction method, dating back thousands of years, just doesn’t match the needs of our times. It is slow and requires highly skilled bricklayers to be done right. Across the developing world, it is possible to see poorly constructed brick dwellings – often built unevenly with poor quality mortar holding the bricks together – that are unsafe in an earthquake.

Training in the Moladi technique takes from one to two weeks for unskilled workers depending on the size of the home. Moladi provides handbooks and all the necessary resources to complete the project. Each project has its own custom-built plastic frames made based on the home’s design.

“There is no flat fee for on-site training; the client is only responsible for covering the travel and living expenses for the Moladi representative or training foreman,” said Hennie Botes.

The ideal size for a project is 15 homes. By building a large number of homes, the individual cost comes down and savings increase.

The system “can be reused 50 times, which means that the more Moladi houses you build, the more economical it becomes,” Botes said. “Compared with the exorbitant cost of traditional construction methods and when current market values are considered, the cost savings of building with the Moladi technology are achieved from the first application.”

As the world’s cities grow, and slums become larger and more prevalent, the urgent need for affordable and decent housing will go hand-in-hand with a need for jobs — particularly jobs for unskilled workers. There just won’t be enough skilled workers to go around to build the homes. Even in developed countries, this has become a problem.

“The recent earthquake disaster in Haiti could benefit from the Moladi system,” Botes said. “Job creation for Haitians is desperately needed and Moladi can immediately facilitate an income for family groups, as over 95 percent of the construction team consists of unskilled labourers. There is no requirement for heavy machinery, or even electricity, and remote areas can be easily accessed; Moladi also allows for the utilisation of building rubble resulting from the earthquake in the construction of new buildings.”

The essence of the Moladi system is breaking down the construction process into simple, replicable steps. It is inspired by the American pioneer of mass production, car maker Henry Ford (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford), who achieved efficiency and low costs in production by simplifying production into standardized and modulated steps.

“The Moladi construction process should be viewed as a workflow process similar to that of a vehicle assembly line,” Botes said. “Through the simplification, standardization, modularization, and industrialization of the construction process, efficiency and cost savings are achieved and maintained by managing the continuous flow process on site.

“Contractors must make sure that they have planned their project roll-out and budget well and have clearly defined goals as to what they want to achieve. It is very important to have all team players and professionals on the same page with regards to their roles and responsibilities.”

In the beginning, Botes encountered resistance to his innovative production methods. “I was highly motivated and really believed in my idea, but when I presented it to investors, they’d shoot holes in it. … It’s been a 22-year journey, but I always kept the goal in mind. Moses spent 40 years in the desert … I’m quite happy my desert experience was only 20-odd years, though,” he told Men’s Health magazine.

South Africa is facing a population growth rate of 1.73 percent a year (UNICEF). It also has 61 percent of the urban population trying to live on four percent of the land, according to Botes. This urban population grows at 2.7 percent a year, yet existing housing needs are not being met. There is already a backlog of 2.2 million homes needed to be built, and this grows by 180,000 every year, according to the Banking Association of South Africa (http://www.banking.org.za/default.aspx).

“Even though the need for housing has always been a fundamental requirement to sustain one’s health and welfare, the advances in this area have been seriously lacking,” said Botes. “The brick and mortar method of construction was recorded as early as 1458 B.C, which means that very little has changed in terms of building structures over a period of almost 3.5 millennia.

“We cannot expect to resolve the housing crisis in our age with a technique developed for the requirements of society 3468 years ago.”

With the success of the Moladi building system, Hennie is working on “producing windows, doors, toilet seats, window frames, sinks and washbasins. If I can include these as part of my product, I’ll reduce the total unit cost of the house.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: February 2010

Moladi is a building and housing solution from South Africa and was featured in Southern Innovator Magazine.

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

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Tiny Homes to Meet Global Housing Crisis

 

More than 1 billion people around the world lack decent shelter. Of these, the majority live in urban areas, usually in slums and informal settlements (UN-HABITAT).

The world’s megacities – like Mumbai, India, where more than 22 million live in the metropolitan region – have to find a way to provide housing that is both affordable and does the minimum possible amount of harm to the environment.

About one-third of the world’s urban dwellers live in slums, and the United Nations estimates that the number of people living in such conditions will double by 2030 as a result of rapid urbanization in developing countries.

The fast pace of growth of India’s cities presents an enormous challenge: how to house so many people with dignity and to a good standard. India’s city slums are notorious and recently became the subject of the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire (http://www.slumdogmillionairemovie.co.uk/).

With a population of 1.2 billion, India needs to find 25 million homes a year to meet current demand, according to McKinsey and Co.

Housing prices have risen by 16 percent a year for the past four years. While the middle class – estimated at over 300 million people – has piled into high-end apartments and houses, it has been the country’s low-income people who have been frozen out of the option of quality homes.

The concept of targeting those at the ‘bottom of the pyramid’ (BOP) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fortune_at_the_Bottom_of_the_Pyramid) has drawn attention to the estimated 23 million poor urban dwellers in India, and 180 million rural families, who have savings and want to own a home. Monitor India (http://www.monitor.com/in/) believes these people have annual earnings between US $1,400 and US $3,000.

The Indian manufacturing powerhouse Tata – which this year launched a BOP-focused car, the Tata Nano – has designed and is building, Nano Homes – small apartments outside Mumbai for US $8,600 (http://tatahousing.in/pages/home.php). It also hopes to expand to other major Indian cities as well.

The Nano homes are built on a modest scale: there are three sizes with the smallest measuring 67 square metres. They consist of a single room that doubles as a bedroom by night with a sink, bath and toilet behind a partition.

Criticisms include location – on the edges of major cities – where residents would have to commute long distances to get to their jobs.

Even so, Nano apartments are so popular buyers are being chosen by lottery.

“India’s housing crisis lies in the fact that the poor in the cities are priced out of the market,” Sundar Burra, an adviser to the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centre, a Mumbai-based housing rights organization, told Canada’s Globe and Mail newspaper.

“State supply of housing for the poor is woefully inadequate in relation to the need. Slums proliferate as a solution to this state of affairs.”

People can get a mortgage for the homes from Tata Home Finance.

Tata is not the only company targeting this market. India’s Matheran Realty (http://www.tmcity.in/) is building what it claim is India’s largest affordable housing project, Tanaji Malusare City, in the villages of Shirse and Akurle of Karjat (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karjat). The 15,000 homes would house 70,000 people and would sell for US $4,698.

Another developer, Godrej Properties (http://www.godrejproperties.com/), is building a BOP housing development outside the city of Ahmedabad with apartments costing US $11,749.

“(Property) developers have recognized that the real demand no longer lies in the premium segment and are opting to build smaller, no-frills apartments,” said Deepak Parekh of the Housing Development Finance Corporation (http://www.hdfcindia.com/).

It estimates the affordable housing market will be worth US$ 110 billion in India by 2013 and will account for 80 percent of India’s housing market.

“Affordable housing is not about box-sized, budget homes in far-flung places where there is no connectivity to workplaces and little surrounding infrastructure,” Parekh told HDFC’s shareholders. “Affordable housing has to be able to cut across all income segments and has to make economic sense in terms of proximity to the workplace.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: November 2009

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JxSYBgAAQBAJ&dq=development+challenges+november+2009&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsnovember2009issue

Southern Innovator Issue 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q1O54YSE2BgC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ty0N969dcssC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Decent and Affordable Housing for the Poor

Urban populations across the South are growing fast: by 2030, some 5 billion people around the world will live in cities. This year will be the first year in which urban dwellers (3.3 billion people) will outnumber rural residents for the first time (UNFPA).

Africa now has a larger urban population than North America and 25 of the world’s fastest growing big cities. Asia and Africa’s cities are growing by an incredible 1 million people a week, with 72 per cent of the population in sub-Saharan Africa living in slum conditions.

How well people dwell is integral to their mental and physical health. Most squatters and slum dwellers – a category that includes half the urban population of Africa, a third in Asia and a fourth in Latin America and the Caribbean – live in makeshift homes made from whatever they can get their hands on. These dwellings are usually unsafe and vulnerable to fire, floods, and earthquakes. On top of this, these sprawling slums can be depressingly grim to look at for those living there.

In Brazil’s Sao Paulo neighbourhood of Heliopolis – the largest of the city’s 400 favelas, or shantytowns – the majority of its dwellings are made from cement and brick. It is stigmatised as the ugliest part of the city, yet a unique initiative has transformed perceptions of the area – and brought pride to its residents. The project offers a model for slum areas looking to make the next leap up the ladder of development. Heliopolis first sprang up in the 1970s, wedged between highways and roads. Plagued by crime, there is a wide spread in incomes and urbanisation among the 120,000 residents packed into the one-and-a-half square mile. Older parts have many services, while newer areas lack basics like plumbing and electricity.

Well-known Sao Paulo-based Brazilian architect Ruy Ohtake (http://www.geocities.com/capitolhill/3836/saopaulo.html) mobilised the 6,000 residents to use a fixed palette of six colours – from bright yellow to deep purples – to create a look described as akin to an Italian hill town.

“Ohtake told a newspaper that Heliopolis was the ugliest part of the city, so we went to him and asked him to figure out how to make it beautiful,” Geronino Barbosa, director of the Heliopolis community group UNAS, told the design magazine Dwell.

Ohtake, famous for his hotel designs and renovating former colonial areas, rose to the challenge: “I believe in beauty as a social function, so what better way to exercise that belief,” he said. To avoid the initiative feeling like something being imposed from on high, the plan did not go ahead until the residents were happy. And to make sure they felt they owned the results, they did all the painting themselves. The result is a river of colour running through a landscape of dreary, unfinished brick homes jammed between streets and factories. The Italian hill town-effect leaves pedestrians experiencing a surprise as they turn through the streets, happening upon hidden plazas and little bars.

“Our dream is to expand this project to the entire favela,” said Barbosa. “People love their painted houses. One of our participants told me that her house has been transformed into a sort of Carnival parade.”

“Who doesn’t want to live in a beautiful house?” said UNAS’ head, Joao Miranda, to Dwell. “We want the same things as everyone else.”

Another architect has tackled the problem of how to create inexpensive but durable and beautiful homes for the poor. Iranian-born architect Nader Khalili (http://www.calearth.org/) has created what he calls ‘super adobe’ dwellings inspired by traditional Iranian rural homes. The cone-shaped homes are made from sandbags piled one on top of the other in a circular pattern. A basic home is three rooms of 400 square feet, and can be built by five people (with only one needing skills), within weeks. Being sandbags, the homes can easily be dismantled and moved or adapted to meet new space needs.

Khalili first fell in love with the sand adobe homes of Iran in the 1970s. He had been on a journey to find a home design that was both environmentally harmonious and could be built anywhere in the world quickly and cheaply. But while the original Iranian sand adobe is easily destroyed by earthquakes and bad weather, the ‘super adobes’ are earthquake, hurricane and flood resistant. They are now being built across the Americas , Asia and Africa.

“You can never build one of these that doesn’t look beautiful,” he said. “Just as you have never seen an ugly tree or an ugly flower.”

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: January 2008

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

Follow @SouthSouth1

Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=dKaXBgAAQBAJ&dq=Development+Challenges+January+2008&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Slideshare: http://www.slideshare.net/DavidSouth1/development-challengessouthsouthsolutionsjanuary2008issue

Southern Innovator Issue 1: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Q1O54YSE2BgC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 2: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ty0N969dcssC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 3: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AQNt4YmhZagC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 4: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=9T_n2tA7l4EC&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

Southern Innovator Issue 5: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=6ILdAgAAQBAJ&dq=southern+innovator&source=gbs_navlinks_s

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.