Rethinking the house form in poor areas

Studying housing requires a multidisciplinary approach in order to come up with comprehensive solutions for physical, social and cultural needs. This thesis intends to bring those needs into the process of creating the house, by proposing a methodology to integrate construction-related, environment, cultural and everyday-life aspects into the definition of individual housing profiles. Furthermore, it intends to show how creating an expert system will allow an incremental construction, by taking into account complex constraints, such as cultural and technical ones, based on a pedagogical and interactive approach towards the inhabitant. This research arises from the low levels of habitability of self-build housing in Ondjiva, in southern Angola. In most cases, houses are not equipped with basic infrastructure and do not adequately respond to climatic demands, which leads to the development of unhealthy environments. Additionally, people live in self-build houses in the city in a contradictory way: on the one hand, by keeping deeply rooted cultural and traditional ways of life and, on the other, by wanting to cut with the traditional image, because it is associated with the opposite of âmodernâ, a term commonly associated to better living conditions. As a result, self-build houses in the city tend to follow Western or more contemporary models, which do not ensure culturally sensitive solutions for local inhabitants. It is urgent to find culturally and technically adequate solutions that will foster sustainable housing construction in these areas, which implies searching for multidisciplinary and holistic solutions, since merely technical solutions can be detrimental to the diversity of ways of life characteristic of contemporary cities; comfortable interior spaces will not be enough if they wonât allow the continuity of cultural specificities. Furthermore, this research was made with the conviction that we can neither change the current building actors nor impose our minimum standards on local peopleâs conception of a house. This could put at risk their specific ways of living and ideal of a house, leading almost certainly to more serious and complex social problems. The creation of an expert system is proposed as a tool to make knowledge available to those who most need it, making it possible for people who already build their own houses to start doing so in an improved and more sustainable way, in a context where experts are nearly almost absent from house building processes. This thesis is addressed to the Kwanyama people â the most predominant ethnic group in the Kwanyama region â and rests on the notion that, without a design oriented towards the inhabitantsâ specific needs, their specific ways of life wonât find the support to exist and develop.

Sustainable Development, Planning and Poverty Alleviation

Jean-Claude Bolay, Eléonore Labattut

In 2018, the world population is around 7.6 billion, 4.2 billion in urban settlements and 3.4 billion in rural areas. Of this total, according to UN-Habitat, 3.2 billion of urban inhabitants live in southern countries. Of them, one billion, or nearly a third, live in slums. Urban poverty is therefore an endemic problem that has not been solved despite all initiatives taken to date by public and private sectors. This global transformation of our contemporary societies is particularly challenging in Asia and Africa, knowing that on these two continents, less than half of the population currently lives in urban areas. In addition, over the next decades, 90% of the urbanization process will take place in these major regions of the world. Urban planning is not an end in itself. It is a way, human and technological, to foresee the future and to act in a consistent and responsible way in order to guarantee the well-being of the populations residing in cities or in their peripheries. Many writers and urban actors in the South have criticized the inadequacy of urban planning to the problems faced by the cities confronting spatial and demographic growth. For many of them the reproduction of Western models of planning is ineffective when the urban context responds to very different logics. It is therefore a question of reinventing urban planning on different bases. And in order to address the real problems that urban inhabitants and authorities are facing, and offering infrastructures and access to services for all, this with the prospect of reducing poverty, to develop a more inclusive city, with a more efficient organization, in order to make it sustainable, both environmental than social and economic. The field work carried out during recent years in small and medium-sized cities in Burkina Faso, Brazil, Argentina and Vietnam allows us to focus the attention of specialists and decision makers on intermediate cities that have been little studied but which are home to half of the world's urban population. From local diagnoses, we come to a first conclusion. Many small and medium-sized cities in the South can be considered as poor cities, from four criteria. They have a relatively large percentage of the population is considered to be poor; the local government and its administration do not have enough money to invest in solving the problems they face; these same authorities lack the human resources to initiate and manage an efficient planning process; urban governance remains little open to democratic participation and poorly integrates social demand into its development plans. Based on this analysis, we consider it is imperative to renovate urban planning as part of a more participatory process that meets the expectations of citizens with more realistic criteria. This process incorporates different stages: an analysis grounded on the identification of urban investment needed to improve the city; the consideration of the social demands; a realistic assessment of the financial resources to be mobilized (municipal budget, taxes, public and international external grants, public private partnership); a continuous dialogue between urban actors to determine the urban priorities to be addressed in the coming years. This protocol serves as a basis for comparative studies between cities in the South and a training program initiated in Argentina for urban actors in small and medium-sized cities, which we wish to extend later to other countries of the South.

2019

Comprendre la construction des périphéries urbaines à Lomé et Yaoundé

Armel Firmin Kemajou Mbianda

Urbanization in Sub-Saharan Africa is mainly marked by an extremely high speed. For a couple of decades, it has become more and more difficult to study and control the urbanization processes using the available means due to their rapidity. These conditions do not allow to master social, cultural and economic potentials of urbanization at their best so as to develop the countries in the sub-Saharan region of Africa. The binding speed of urban sprawl that we are witnessing further leads to an accelerated consumption of natural spaces, and more generally, to a degradation of natural ecosystems; while the urgency to tackle the environmental crisis requires the establishment of more sustainable models of cities. Indeed, in addition to the rapid consumption of natural spaces, cities are responsible the most for the global production of greenhouse gases and other negative externalities for the environment. This is why our response to climate change necessarily involves smart choices in urban planning. In my doctoral research the urban peripheries are what constitute the most relevant research objects â the crucial ingredients to debate on the African city of the future. Surprisingly, very little attention has ever been drawn on them. I hold that no urban planning would be effective without a careful study of the shared reality of social, economic, political and cultural dynamics of the cities concerned. This hypothesis further leads me to offer a solid understanding of construction mechanisms in the peripheral areas of such two large cities as LomÃ© and YaoundÃ© in thinking about the models of the future. A two-tier triangulation is used to achieve the study goal. Three different thematic entries namely urban land, mobility and the legal framework for town planning get used at the theoretical level. At the methodological one, a variety of tools are made available for data collection and analysis to deal with the difficult processes of accessing urban data. GPS tracking of motorcycle taxis operating in emerging neighborhoods, participatory mapping for land use and prices at the agglomeration level, Geo-Computation, Geo-visualization, content analysis and more traditional interviews are the main methods used in my research. The thesis shows that the construction of a larger portion of new neighborhoods in the cities of LomÃ© and YaoundÃ© result in a weaving of a sort of âindividual urbanistic projectsâ, which are totally outside the rule of law. The speed and spatiality of this process are also strongly increased by motorcycle taxisâmeans of transport unprecedented in their scaleâwhich come massively along with the new residentsâ home ownership projects. Again, the thesis highlights that the configuration of the land market escapes the administrative limits of cities, thus rendering the lawful measures non-operational in the planning and monitoring of space. All in all, the research results reveal individual strategies to be extremely varied and complex even if all residents of urban peripheries seem like to âbet onâ their urban status to regain it later. This latest finding dispels the myth that the lower middle class moves as far from the city center as possible in search of affordable land. On the basis of major results, the thesis formulates practical recommendations aimed at improving urban planning policies in sub-Saharan Africa, in the sense of making them more in line with the reality of the cityâs production processes.

EPFL2020

Scrutinizing the Circular Economy concept applied at the urban level:A contribution based on the analysis of urban circularity indicators, the categorization ofCircular Economy interventions, and the identification of factors fostering the adoption ofcircular innovation.

Valeria Superti

Problem. Our current economic systems are deemed unsustainable. Although a global issue, the objective of living in a sustainable society is increasingly an urban challenge, as a rising 50% of the world's population currently dwell in cities. To secure a better urban future, integrated and actionable urban knowledge focused on what urban sustainability entails and how to achieve it is needed. In this context, the Circular Economy (CE) concept fosters efficient resource use through value-retention processes and waste minimization. Despite the wide attention on the CE, its interconnectedness with, and contribution to, sustainability, and whether these concepts might support or hinder each other, have not yet been clarified. Besides, knowledge is needed to guide cities towards a CE, for example, by identifying the types of interventions needed to achieve circularity, and the factors affecting the adoption of innovation that can foster it.Aim. This dissertation aims to scrutinize the CE concept applied in urban settings. It is based on a) the analysis of indicators used to assess circular cities, b) the categorization of interventions aimed at achieving a CE, and c) the identification of factors that affect the adoption of recycled products, as one measure towards CE.Approach. Indicators used to assess circularity and sustainability in urban settings were analyzed and compared. Semi-structured expert interviews were performed to iterate a framework that categorizes interventions that foster the achievement of a CE. A behavioral framework was developed that combines insights from the theory of adoption of innovation and behavioral theories, to identify and analyze the factors that can affect architects' decisions to recommend recycled concrete. A survey was used to gather quantitative insights from architects on their beliefs about the selected product.Insights. The results show that the concept of an urban CE is embedded in the broader concept of urban sustainability; however, the use of CE indicator sets entail a more detailed focus on certain thematic groups (e.g., waste production and management), for which more indicators are available in comparison with what offered by urban sustainability indicator sets. To categorize CE interventions, the proposed framework (RISE: Research & Realize, Implement, Support, Enable) offers a tool to guide the achievement of CE targets. In current circularity assessments, specifically in the construction sector, most attention is paid to implementation interventions (e.g., the quantity of material recycled). However, some of them (e.g., recycling strategies) still face barriers. Focusing on one recycling strategy (i.e., recycling concrete aggregates for recycled concrete) we inquired about the factors that affect this product's adoption. A senior position, a high level of knowledge of the material and a specific label, beliefs about the material's lower environmental impact, and prescriptive social norms affect the selected innovation's adoption. Finally, we suggest leveraging specific predictors of behavior to increase the recommendation of recycled concrete.Conclusions. This work contributed to shed light on the CE concept. This research challenged the added value of focusing on a CE rather than sustainability. Furthermore, it put forward a) an integrative perspective on achieving a CE focusing on a systemic approach, and b) a holistic behavioral framework for analyzing innovation adoption.

EPFL2021