Pseudo-Live Blogging the De Lange Conference

Update from the morning session: Cameron Sinclair is a pretty cool dude. Here’s the unedited notes from the morning session, I’ll come through and clean these up later.

Cameron Sinclair: Architecture for Humanity

The group builds things in developing countries, places where there’s a real lack of resources and professional services.

The group is not: recovery workers, recovery experts.

In high-risk areas there tends to be systemic poverty, and when disaster strikes the plans of the local groups tend to get thrown out by larger NGO relief groups.

The group are not just architects. They arm communities with the expertise and social capital to build sustainably. During a disaster what the community needs more than anything else is jobs, so they can get back to work. People in disaster don’t need architecture, they need food on the table.

NGO’s see victims, but AFH sees partners. The local people see, feel, touch the issues surrounding them, and can add expert ideas to the design process.

Five ways of working: Project Match, Design and Construction, Idea to Implementation, Contests,Open Innovation

South Asia Tsunami the government provided all metal sheds for 200 families to live in, the locals deserted these en masse.

NGO’s don’t have the local connections or building knowledge to get high quality stuff built.

Also, architects tend to go in to these areas and build ‘experimental housing’ to test out the zany ideas that they have for buildings, and offer these to disaster victims, though they often don’t work.

Locals do fairly well at building things themselves. They make buildings out of thatch and leaves etc if they have nothing else to work with.

The AFH project architects live and work in the communities, long time commitment required in order to learn from the locals and add real value rather than just forcing outside ideas on them.

They quickly are able to build effective structures for the community.

There’s been a lot of push-back, however, from the other NGO’s. One quote: “You guys are so ghetto, you don’t even have signage.”

However, there’s an important side effect: when people brand things the “Ronald McDonald community center” it takes away ownership from the community, they don’t maintain it, and they begin to expect Ronald to come fix ‘his’ building.

They build almost all buildings off the grid, because the grid isn’t very reliable abroad and because it gives the community a sustainable solution.

They invest in community needs and desires, including things like cricket pitches that help bring competing groups together.

He offered one example of a project that failed, these portable tents that they sent to Grenada.

The design idea was really good, but in a few there was a design flaw that caused the tent to fail in heavy rain. They fixed this and started over.

Sinclair argues that there should be an entire conference on the failures of NGOs, because they learn so much from failure.

Story of Katrina:

Everyday citizens decided that they’d had enough, and thousands showed up to do something when they felt the government wasn’t doing enough.

AFH worked in Biloxi MS, where 52 churches got wiped out the group went in and focused on building the churches to restore the community and cultural center.

FEMA trailers were not sent to places because they held to stupid regulations like “you can’t put these in a commercial parking lot because they are residential units.”

Insurance companies gave horrible damage estimates, calling buildings that should have been condemned a 7-8k water damage.

Architecture is a political act. People got together.

When the areas were politically monotonous (all repubs) the government got out of the way. Places that were divided got stuck in political infighting.

AFH helped coordinate unskilled labor to get work done, and they helped create forgivable loans. People who had been there for generations and therefore had never had a mortgage had no credit and could not get a loan.

In the time it took the government to do flood elevation assessment on 3 homes, a coordinated group of volunteers did 3000.

Biloxi model home program supported by Oprah’s angel network. They created a model set of plans for the community and made them fully open-source.

All the details, construction technology, and funding mechanisms were shared open source. 44% of East Biloxi was built without a federal dollar.

1 out of 7 people in the earth are living in shanty-slums, not architecturally designed buildings. But in 20 years it will be 1 out of 3.

Open architecture network, goal to improve the living standards of 5 billion people.

Put architecture back in the hands of the community, empower people to work and build for themselves.

Anti-starchitecture.

OpenArchitectureChallenge.org → goal to create a new and improved replacement for portable classrooms.