Human Settlements Review - Parliamentary Monitoring Group

Human Settlements Review, Volume 1, Number 1, 2010
of sand, a material so ubiquitous that it is
routinely undervalued, to create affordable
storeyed houses in Cape Town. In similar
vein, architect Jo Noero interpreted four
ordinary prototypes of free standing buildings
to create a varied dense urban architecture in
the Lenasia low-income housing project (see
Sorrell, 2009).
Using and Maintaining the Building
Many decisions done at design stage in terms
of passive measures and technologies can
achieve good buildings with high levels of
comfort and low environmental load without
much initial expenditure
Reuse of Existing Building
Reusing existing buildings makes a lot of
economic and environmental sense. The
locked in embodied resources are not wasted
and the no new resource demands are made.
To be reusable, buildings must be designed to
be adaptable to different users and uses based
on flexibility in space sizes and configurations
as well as on possibilities for altering the
envelop.
Demolishing
When buildings get to finally be demolished,
reuse of components is an alternative that
can be explored. This particularly requires
forethought in terms of designing for
disassembly. In this regard for example,
bolted connections can be better than nailed
ones. Components of buildings which can
be reused include bricks, windows, doors,
wooden/structural structural members. The
rubble itself can also be reused in numerous
other ways. It is possible for communities
to self-organise to recover as much from
demolished buildings as possible. Apart from
the usual definition of raw-materials as those
unprocessed ones from nature, an innovative
approach also includes (demolition and other)
garbage as a potential source of raw-materials.
Using garbage as a construction resource
offers a number of advantages. It reduces
the amount of garbage that must be thrown
away/treated, it usually freely and locally
available, and it can provide employment
opportunities for the jobless. In a sense also,
use of garbage for construction is a sure way
to recover embodied resources and pre-empt
consumption of more. The opportunities for
innovation in seeing garbage as a building
resource is immense. That a good designer
can put garbage to refreshing architectural
use is evident in the works of Nina Maritz (a
graduate of the University of Cape Town) such
as at Twyfelfontein Rock Art Museum Visitor
Centre in Namibia. Another example is the
Wat Pa Maha Chedio Kaew temple in Thailand
where monks used approximately 1.5 million
bottles to build a temple. More recently,
a floating dining room was constructed in
Vancouver with empty plastic bottle. Successful
incorporation of garbage as a useful resource
in the construction process is a sure way of
achieving a sustainable system of construction
over the entire lifecycle of building in a closed
cradle-to-cradle loop.
Government empowered self-help
efforts
To catalyse the incremental innovation activities
described above, this paper recommends
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