There is need for affordable and sustainable building materials
production that should be conventionally accepted, climatically sensitive and
affordable to the urban poor. In Malawi, the conventional main building
material is burnt brick. This material has done a lot of injustice to our environment.
Trees are alarmingly going unabatedly at a very fast pace in the urban
outskirts to supply the insatiable building industry. The urban poor can no longer
compete for the material on the market, making construction costs for their
urban housing project skyrocketing. To
meet our 21,000 housing demand according to UN projections, 1.7 billion bricks
has to be burnt. With simple calculations, based on unsustainable energy
inefficient Malawi traditional brick clamps, this would mean over 11,198 cubic
metres of wood clearing over 3000ha of forest and emitting over 150,000 tonnes
of carbon dioxide annually. So this is just bricks for housing which exclude
institutional and commercial buildings which consume even more. Out of the 13
million people in Malawi, approximately 200,000 are connected to electricity
supply. It’s sad to say that the rest rely on the charcoal and firewood for
basic energy supply on day to day use. There is intense pressure that goes into
our forest resource. The forestry department projected that we are losing
33,000ha of forest per annum. And the poor, especially women are hit hard with
this trend (normally, women in Malawi are the ones that spend hours fetching
firewood and they are further choked by smoke in poorly ventilated kitchens).
 |
| Figure 1:Inadequate and appalling Housing Situation common in Malawi Informal settlements-Earth is the basic material the poor can afford |
We (a team of Seven Manchester School of Architecture
students) are currently doing research on rammed earth which we see as a
potential climatically adaptable and sustainable material which is affordable to the urban poor. We
hypothesize that rammed earth would significantly reverse the above scenario if
applied at a large scale. Unfortunately the conventional construction system
and building regulations in Malawi regard earth building as primitive and not
suitable for urban areas. Our research orientation is focusing on trying to improving
properties of this material or tracing any other best practices that would
equally reverse the trend above while
making our urban areas an adequate habitat for all, especially the
marginalised poor. Your input into the research or alternative approach will
highly be appreciated.
Figure 2 Environment Plundered by burnt Brick
Thanks for a thought provoking piece of work. As luck would have it I have just returned from Malawi where amongst other things I met with both the Buildings Department at the Ministry of Public Works and the National Construction Industry Council, NCIC, an umbrella that brings in professional bodies such as Architects and Engineers, contractors and ministry groups. This meeting was about work going on within SADC, the regional economic group, to harmonise the Zimbabwe Standard Code of Practice on Rammed Earth across the 15 SADC states, which includes Malawi. The process requires countries to vote in favour if their stakeholder groups, such as NCIC and Buildings Department, request it. And in this case they did, and the Malawi Bureau of Standards voted yes, and 6 other countries in the region voted yes, so by simple majority the entire SADC region now has a harmonised standard on Rammed Earth and you can use it in urban areas. I hope this helps, please be in touch @rammedearth for more.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much Rowland for your input. The information provided is so helpful.
ReplyDelete