Climate change is still greatly debated despite the fact that the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) released a report last month which demonstrated that the earth's temperature has been above average for 406 consecutive months since national records began in 1895. This is more than 33 years which many are chalking up to correlation and not causation. Leaving that factor aside for a moment, let’s jump over to something somewhat, but not entirely, unrelated: homelessness. Shelter UK just announced that at least 320,000 people are homeless in Britain. That is a population larger than most average-sized towns like Newcastle and Brighton and Hove or in American terms, Riverside, CA and St. Louis, MO.
Now, I said that this was not entirely “jump” between the ecological and housing crises and here’s why. The industrial sector is the third largest contributor of CO2 emissions with China contributing 10,641,789 kt of CO2 emissions with the US running second with 5,172,336 kt of CO2 in 2014. While many freely blame China for being the number one polluter of the planet, the figures for this country are skewed by the fact that China is producing anywhere from a fifth to a third of goods specifically for export. This leaves the US, when analyzing the data per capita, the number two polluter on the planet with other developing countries closely following with Saudi Arabia in the number one slot.
So with the homeless crisis in the UK pushing political discussions into the pragmatic these months and with 564,708 people in the US homeless as of 2016, it is as worrying that so many people are living in such precarious conditions as it is that the preferred solution to this is to increase the carbon footprint in building. It is no secret that social housing is largely made from cement which contributes annually 6% to global carbon emissions and yet few councils in the UK or government housing forums in the US are considering alternatives to this problem. How to house people and do so ethically?
The UK has been a trailblazer for constructing social housing throughout the country since the Second World War, integrating society’s poorest within all neighborhoods. The ghettoization of poverty that you see in the US is geographically deterred in the UK with the integration of social housing in some of the countries wealthiest neighborhoods. Similarly, the concept of upscale housing needing to correspond to certain neighborhoods is a very North American concept. For instance, one living in Manhattan’s East Village often goes hand in hand with the expectation of certain amenities such as restaurants, shops, and movie theaters nearby; yet these same amenities are simply not considered by many urban planners when “retrofitting” Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighborhood. The difference between the ghettoization of communities in the US and the integration of social housing in the UK is something to behold for certain.
But now we have a double mandate to create social housing that moves away from ghettoizing the poor in the US while embracing new technology in both the UK and US. In short, we need alternatives to cement structures. And the answer lies not within a disagreement of technology or the lack of resources, but this is a cultural issue at heart where we need to move toward a social integration model within urban planning and a forward-thinking ecological materials and design model of architecture. And this is already happening in many other countries.
SOMOS Arquitectos have completed a social housing project in Madrid, Spain called 123 Social Green Housing. This is an eight-story complex which incorporates 123 apartments with an exterior clad in three different shades of green plastic panels on aluminum frames. This project is ecological due to the recyclable nature of the materials and the low energy used in manufacturing and transport.
In Hong Kong, the studio James Law Cybertecture recently developed a prototype for low-cost, stackable micro homes made of recycled concrete pipes, which can fit into gaps between city buildings due to Hong Kong’s vast housing crisis and conterminous lack of space. Because each concrete tube is 2.5 meters wide, each unit can easily slot into narrow gaps between buildings making the possibility of quickly produced social housing a breeze. These units can be stacked up to four high without any additional supports and although still in an experimental phase, this project holds hope for relieving, short-term at least, Hong Kong’s housing crisis while serving as a model for many other cities facing similar plights. Still, there are critiques of this project even though the criticism is largely aimed at the small size of the housing units and not the feasibility of the project for short-term housing relief.
And one cannot forget to highlight one of Asia’s frontrunners in the field today, Vietnam-based Vo Trong Nghia Architects, which has unveiled a series of prototypes of low-cost housing designs for the Delta region’s housing crisis. Having moved towards mass production, the S-House 2 is built using local materials like bamboo, Vietnamese thatch and coir fiber sheets with a frame made either of steel or in recent years pre-cast concrete. The house can be dismantled and transported by boat which is the predominant means of transport in the Mekong Delta. With a cost of US $4,000 per house, this house is providing the poorest with sustainable housing options.
While politicians might argue over the reality of global warming and who is to blame for the homeless crisis, the options for ecological housing are right in front of our nose. This will take our readjusting what is a “reasonable size” for living accommodations and our adapting to more ecological models of living, to include a lower use of electricity, the inclusion of grey water into home recycling systems, and the purchase of fewer goods, just to name a few. Even for those of us who are not living in social housing, we all have the obligation to adapt our use of resources like electricity and water to make room for new social structures that involve resource sharing. The ideal model of future housing should not be “how close is the apartment to gourmet coffee and restaurants?” but rather “what is the carbon footprint of the space?”
