Blow-Up Sustainable Modular Houses for Slum Dwellers Amid Covid-19

Elhadidi, May; Mousa, Haidy; Tonini, Pietro

ACCESS at Mediterranean Architecture and the Green-Digital Transition (2023) pp 265–280, Part of the Innovative Renewable Energy book series (INREE)

Slums form about 60% of housing worldwide, vulnerable to climate change impacts, pandemics, and socioeconomic issues. Therefore, Blow-up is an incremental building project aimed to provide unfinished and modular low-cost houses for the Slum Dwellers in the hot climate region of Sudan. The paper represents an attempt to introduce through smart architectural solutions a sustainable, self-sufficient, and integrated urban settlement resilient to climate change challenges, and pandemics such as Covid-19. Blow-up also aims at converting solid wastes from an issue to be the project’s building unit and an economic asset to its dwellers. The unit design is generated by biomimicry for the exoskeletal hermit crabs where their shell is their portable, replaceable, and temporary habitat. It consists of an inflatable flood-resilient modular structure that expands and modifies according to family growth and future needs as pandemics. The design integrates local and recycled materials such as plastic, wood, PVC pipes, cardboard, and woven straw, with innovative systems for renewable energy resources such as photovoltaic printed sheets (Duranton, World Bank Res Obs 30:39–73, 2015) and Vortex bladeless wind turbines (Ezeh et al., Lancet 389:547–586, 2017). It also incorporates rainwater and vapor harvesting (UN-Habitat, Manag Environ Qual 15:337–338, 2004), with sustainable urban agriculture and smart waste management techniques. Furthermore, the urban setting of the units is introduced to create a viable, self-sufficient interlocking community with central distribution of resources and services. A waste management strategy, water supply and distribution analysis, and cost estimation study were developed to determine the project’s incrementation, operation, and maintenance plan. Results indicate that integrating architecture with urban agriculture using smart recycled materials from local resources and simple technologies could create a livable community encouraging work, education, and development of local environmental businesses. Blow-up is an eco-systemic tool to facilitate a person’s integration into society stimulating homeownership through the philosophy of incremental building yet attaining SDGs, mainly SDG 7, 9, 11, 12, and 13.