Strictly speaking, shelter is outside the remit of this blog. However the article The Exigent City in the New York Times was an excellent piece of reporting, and I urge everybody to read it. (HT: Simmy Ross) The article closes with the following lines:

When I first contacted Cameron Sinclair, who started Architecture for Humanity with Kate Stohr in 1999, he replied with a long e-mail message that began, “You’ve stumbled upon the question of the century for those working in the built environment,” and ended with a signature line that listed his title as “Eternal Optimist.” A lot of people I spoke to afterward agreed with the first sentiment; almost no one with the second. The world is short a billion homes. Now all we need are a few million architects to help build them.

I’m not optimistic either, but nor do I agree that we need a few million architects. What we need is to help the people who need a billion homes to become their own architects - to develop simple, workable construction forms that can be disseminated easily and virally. There’s a role in that first part for architects, urban planners and shelter experts, sure - but the second part can only be achieved if we take a different approach to the actual construction process.

We can’t can’t rely on central planning to take into account the massive and growing improvised urban areas - at best they’ll be able to provide basic services, but not even that is guaranteed - so poor communities already build their own dwellings, which is where shanty towns come from in the first place. The poor are already their own architects, so the only solution is to help them become better architects who build better dwellings - better in the sense of being more robust, more environmentally friendly, more durable and more liveable.

So we come back around to the role of ICT, which for the first time offers a way of disseminating this information on a large scale at relatively low cost. The question is, what’s the best vector for that dissemination, how do we ensure access to the information, and what forms do we need to use to make the information relevant to the end users?

Answers on a postcard to the Shelter Centre, I guess….