The Future Of Affordable, Eco-Friendly Housing

As climate change intensifies, the quest is on for innovative, ultra low cost, sustainable and site-responsive housing prototypes that can be replicated in high risk areas worldwide

The landmark Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2021 report warned of increased extreme heatwaves, droughts and flooding, as well as a key temperature limit on track to be broken in just over a decade. This highlights the urgency with which climate change is intensifying. With it, housing stability is increasingly coming under threat as well. These two inextricably linked issues have the potential to spark innovative ideas from the international design community and the community at large.

The design philosophy thus is to achieve an innovative, sustainable, cultural, and site-responsive housing prototype, which would be research-based, product/system-oriented, and ultra-low-cost. The goal is also to use waste-recycled and locally-available materials to achieve a Carbon Positive Affordable Housing for a typical, replaceable chosen site context. The low-income, natural disaster-prone estuarine belt of the Sundarbans in India serves as an example, which can be applied to other similar climatic site contexts with the potential of a much wider application.

THE CONTEXT

The site context chosen is for example only and is in the tropical Sunderbans estuary region of eastern India. The location has a hot and humid climate, and it is prone to natural disasters of annual seasonal flooding, cyclones, and hurricanes, as well as moderate earthquakes. The inhabitants are very low-income farmers and fishermen, who often lose their homes and livelihood to natural calamities. There are supposedly government ‘Pukka’ (structurally sound) housing loan schemes to self-build homes for a budget of INR 2.4 lakhs or approx US$3,120. This is still unaffordable, and therefore, the extra design effort to bring the cost significantly down is attempted here.