Making architecture work for the poor
SEEDS helps in designing disaster-resilient habitats for communities, writes Samali Basu Guha
It was a cloudy winter afternoon in 2013. The SEEDS team was assessing the Chakra ward in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. There were a few children playing in the murky waterlogged areas. One of them was 10-year-old Manoj, who was running a small stationery shop. The school there was an informal settlement in a riverbed. There were no permanent structures were allowed. A few parents enrolled their children in schools across the highway, more than 2 km away. But it meant crossing the National Highway, which was infamous for accidents. The end result: Most children stayed at home.
A significant portion of the region was low lying, which made it vulnerable to climate changes and frequent waterlogging.
After much negotiations and consultations with local stakeholders and the government, SEEDS was able to put together a pre-fab semi-open school made of bamboo and steel. The design was done in a way that could be dismantled and moved with the community if needed.
“Why should professional disciplines and beautiful design be accessible only to those who can afford it? We make architecture work for the people. It is the users that are in the driving seat of the design process. The right built environment also helps in lowering the impact of a disaster,” says Anshu Sharma, co-founder, SEEDS.
Since its inception in 1994, SEEDS has been working on rebuilding homes and schools for the most vulnerable families in the aftermath of a disaster.
Design, though, matters a lot. Rejecting the one-size-fits-all model, SEEDS uses local (and wherever possible natural) materials and integrates modern disaster-resistance techniques with traditional practices. These include bamboo, wood, stone, mud, CGI sheeting, traditional grasses and often salvaged material found after a disaster.
“This approach of melding with the local culture, rather than importing foreign materials, helps decrease the carbon footprint and also provides social benefits,” adds Sharma. SEEDS also works with communities to train people on safer construction practices. Over the years, the SEEDS Mason Academy has become an integral part of the organisation. Anshu mentions Ramesh Bhai, a mason who worked with the organisation to rebuild homes after the Gujarat earthquake in 2001. He now helps disaster-hit families across India rebuild their homes!
“Good professional advice can lower building costs and improve quality over the long term. It may be more effective than prescribing what can or cannot be built. Major improvements can be made in all these areas, and that, too, relatively cheaply. But costs will remain low only if the community and local groups are encouraged to participate fully in defining what they need, in deciding what they will contribute to the new services, and in doing the job with their own hands,” says Sharma.
The unique design approach reflects also in the approaches to advocacy, communication and training. Complicated designs are broken down into easy, simple-to-understand formats, which can be done by the community themselves.
“After all,” says Sharma, “beautiful, safe and long-lasting traditional buildings in different parts of the world were designed and built before architecture became a formal discipline. Respecting this becomes the foundation for creating community spaces that work.”
One of SEEDS’ project communities in Bihar has installed a weather gauge of its own at the river near the village.
“Village volunteers are able to monitor levels themselves and issue warnings and evacuation action. In a situation where weather warnings issued by government agencies convey little to them about the implication for their own village, they have a hyper-local warning system of their own,” says Sharma.
“We work with the most vulnerable communities, which are often illegal in the eyes of the system. These include urban slums, where we are currently running our innovation lab. Under the innovation lab, we are improving housing conditions, water, sanitation and health with incremental improvements over what people already have. The lab focusses on local innovators, and we work with them to improve and scale their ideas. They continue to hold intellectual property rights for their ideas.”