Last year was the first time more people in the world lived in cities than in rural areas. But the boom has not come to posh downtown enclaves or middle-class neighbourhoods. It has happened in slums, where one in seven of the world’s population now live – in appalling conditions – and where one in three are expected to live by 2025. From the US to Africa, government officials are wondering how to cope.
Architecture for Humanity, a California-based non-profit organisation, thinks it has the answer. Launched in 1999 as a way of getting architects and designers to help people displaced by the Kosovo war, the organisation has since shifted its focus from disaster and refugee relief to improving slums and other unplanned settlements. “The next war is not going to be about oil, it’s going to be about water, housing, education,” says co-founder Cameron Sinclair. “We want to challenge the creative profession to do something about it. It’s about starting smart growth.”
His group’s new book, Design Like You Give A Damn (Thames & Hudson, £16.95) shows exactly what he means by that. The housing featured – created by Architecture for Humanity and other groups – is cheap to build, made of locally available materials and easily adaptable to different environments.
Take the Dome Village in downtown Los Angeles set up by activist Ted Hayes and architect Craig Chamberlain and funded by Arco, a unit of energy giant BP. The collection of 20 pod-like, polyester fibreglass structures may look strange but it’s a big improvement on the “cardboard cities” typically occupied by the city’s homeless. One unit, housing up to 34 tenants, costs $10,000 and can be assembled by two people in four hours using a stepladder, screwdriver and wrench.
Another initiative highlighted in the book is the Quinta Monroy Housing Project, created by design team Taller de Chile and sponsored by Chile’s Ministry of Housing and Urbanism. The goal was to replace illegal “sprawling squatter settlements” with “dignified” low-income housing and the budget set for each home was $7,500. The designers opted for a U-shaped arrangement of stylish single-storey and duplex structures, allowing families to expand vertically rather than spreading out.
Sinclair talks about “urban acupuncture” – inserting well-designed housing on a small scale and encouraging the spread of better living conditions “like a viral flow” through impoverished communities. Hence, Rethinking Tent City, a project that challenges architects to come up with a solution to slums in Mumbai, Jakarta, São Paulo and Kibera, Kenya. “Either you bulldoze everything and build sweatboxes or you try these small, pinpoint changes,” he says. “It’s more cost-effective, it creates a more knitted community and it’s successful.”
His confidence is warranted, given how far Architecture for Humanity has come in the last seven years. Sinclair and his partner Kate Stohr started it after realising how many homeless Kosovans were still living in the country but without the refugee aid given to those who had fled. There was a desperate need not for temporary accommodation but for medium-term “transitional” housing.
Sinclair quit his assistant designer job, consulted with non-governmental organisations and launched a competition to solve the problem. More than 220 entries flooded in and he and Stohr raised more than $100,000. They planned to go to Kosovo to turn the winning designs into a handful of real buildings but the interim government, concerned about losing its aid, said it could only accept big projects.
Undeterred, the couple continued to run “design-build” competitions, collaborating with aid organisations after natural disasters. Architecture for Humanity has since set up design teams in hurricane-hit towns in Grenada and the US, built schools for “brothel children” in Calcutta and worked on mobile medical units and a “perfect” football pitch in poor areas of South Africa. Its response to the 2004 south-east Asia tsunami was to help build community centres and homes, including the Safe(R) House, which is five times more resistant to the force of a wave than traditional structures. Today, the organisation has more than 1,500 designers participating in local “meet-ups” and links to more than 40 independent architectural groups.
“It started as an idea, turned into an organisation and ended up a movement,” Sinclair says. “We had unfortunate but great timing. There was an awakening of ethical social values [in 2001] after 9/11. Designers and architects began questioning what they were doing in the world and our members quadrupled in number . . . A lot of designers are looking to work in a more meaningful way.”
Design Like You Give A Damn serves as a showcase not only for Architecture for Humanity’s projects but also for the work of 80 other architects and designers, from Hayes’s Dome Village to Iranian architect Nader Khalili’s $600 Super Adobe structures for Iraqi refugees to Trevor Field and Ronnie Stievers’ Play Pump, which uses energy generated by South African children on a merry-go-round to pump water into a tower.
Sinclair jokes that he “hoodwinked” his publishers. “The book isn’t really about us,” he says. “It’s about the designers and communities that we have met over the last five years of doing our work.”
In other words, it’s a noble public relations exercise. “I’d go to dinner parties so excited about a project that I’d tell everyone and people would listen open-mouthed,” he says. “These architects are doing amazing work but are just too busy to talk about it.“
British-born Sinclair has given up hands-on designing and is modest about his own achievements – “I’m no hero architect.” But others have showered him with praise. In 2004, he was named as one of Fortune magazine’s “Aspen Seven”, seven people who are changing the world for the better and this year he was nominated for a Designer of the Year award by the UK’s Design Museum as the face of Architecture for Humanity. (He lost to Jamie Hewlett, creator of virtual band Gorillaz, but doesn’t seem to mind. “How can we be in the same category?” he laughs. “It’s crazy!”)
In the long term, recognition from a business publication such as Fortune could be more important. “There is something starting in America called venture philanthropy which embraces social entrepreneurs,” he explains. “They’ll invest in many projects expecting only one to succeed but [wanting] it to be big. My primary concern is to provide a basic human right but if someone makes a ton of money on that I don’t care. The UN estimates that it will cost trillions of dollars to deal with urban growth and by embracing public-private partnerships we have the best chance of coming up with a solution. America understands that big problems mean big business.”
Political support is also important and Sinclair thinks Architecture for Humanity is gaining more clout. “We’re not a fringe group, we’re a voting block and that makes politicians listen,” he says. “We don’t blame people; we have solutions. Everyone loves solutions.”
With dozens of disaster relief and regeneration projects in the works around the world, Sinclair has little time to reflect on his achievements. But he does have one story about a day he took some of his volunteers out to dinner after a hard day of building work. “Gradually it dawned on the locals who we were and they gave us a standing ovation,” he says. “It’s sappy to say, but those are the moments that count.”
Architecture for Humanity, tel: +1 415- 332 6273; www.architectureforhumanity.org
