Humanitarian architecture: building change?

Abby Mellick Lopes and Gaurang Desai

reviewing Architecture for Humanity

Link: http://designphilosophypolitics.informatics.indiana.edu/?p=47

The humanitarian theme has long captured the imaginations of western architects and designers. There is a

recent history of Papanek-inspired web-based initiatives that generate and share design ideas for developing

world problems. Architecture for Humanity (AfH), a not-for profit web-based organization established in 1999,

takes this approach to the built environment as ‘open-source humanitarian architecture’.

Borrowing from the idea of open-source software which is developed in a collaborative, non-proprietary way, AfH

claims that applying the open-source model to architecture will lead to improved on-the-ground solutions for

‘underserved’ communities.

AfH’s approach is heavily event-based (responding to war, calamities etc). It has been involved in a number of

post-disaster design projects which have been actualized quickly. The Model Home project pairs Hurricane

Katrina victims with architects who construct new houses for them. Calamitous events profoundly disturb existing

cultural systems making their analysis and documentation difficult. While such remedial projects are well

meaning, their focus is on aspirational appeal; they are largely reactive and do little to address the complex and

relational nature of the current and future problems of environmental refugees. Less charitably, the disaster

provides a heuristic opportunity for the architect/designer to exercise their creative skill – as put in the words of

AfH founder, Cameron Sinclair, ‘to test their ideas in austere enviroments’. One wonders what some of these

seamlessly symmetrical, universally transportable Model Homes might look like after five years.

The relational consequences of open-source design as it links into a pre-existing place and social ecology are not

adequately explored. A case in point is the proposal for a Kenaf field clinic, an on-site medical clinic for the

treatment of HIV/AIDS suffers in sub-Saharan Africa, grown from Kenaf seeds, mown to form interior spaces and

finally eaten. This idea has considerable aesthetic appeal in a western context – you can provide shelter, treat

AIDS sufferers and provide nutrition in one fell swoop. However one can only wonder what its impacts would be if

rolled out as a massive solution.

Many AfH projects follow the western style of participatory design where designers come in and ‘skill up’ local

populations to participate in building projects. This practice has been widely criticized for its assumption that

modern development is inherently good and desirable. There are complex questions that should be addressed

about the aspirations being served in what is developed, the historical dimension of prior development and what
the long term consequences of importing one cultural model into another (such as the community centre

established in Ambedkar Nagar, India by AfH) might be. This kind of on-the-ground development is part of a

strategy that Sinclair refers to as the ‘leap back’ – the notion that communities in need simply lack the

technological means of self-determination. This thinking asserts the trajectory and ideals of western development

even if in the guise of its opposite (see Tony Fry Design, Development and Questions of Direction’ (in Design

Philosophy Papers Issue 4, 2005).

The next phase of AfH is the ‘Open Architecture Network’. The newly established network, enabled by a grant

from the TED prize, looks like it could be a useful entity as it becomes populated with existing and proposed

projects. The data base allows access to the workspace of project participants via annotated images and

discussions and invites further opinion, elaborations and problem-solving from members of the on-line network.

This suggests a potentially interesting model of reflection-in-action. However the idea – facilitated by the

developing-world ‘Creative Commons’ license that protects designers’ liability and copyrights at home whilst they

can give away their ideas to the developing world – is that the database of projects and constructions will take

root fast ‘in the field’. Transparency of process does not however necessarily make solving the problem of a

specific situation and its complexity of existing relationships any easier. The claim is that the designs being

shared are ‘proven ideas’. Once built, the problem has apparently been solved. This model assumes that the

identity of a space is purely functional and carried in its blueprint. But how can we know if it has helped to

regenerate the community? What worlds will it open and what ecological impacts will it have?

AfH’s recent Open Architecture Challenge calls for designers to submit concepts for IT-based projects for

various‘under-served’ communities around the globe (such as: a telemedicine centre in Nepal; a technology

media centre for the youth of a Nairobi slum settlement). Again, this project lacks critical reflection, buying intp

the Western idea, actualized by the internet, that information is knowledge. But in spite of the rhetoric about

interactivity, it is the sound of one hand clapping. Like the paperless office, the idea of distributed collaboration

sounds great in theory but in reality access is only part of the picture. To take an example, the dissemination of

rapid prototyping technology through the Fab Lab project which brings design technologies to ‘under-served’

communities to facilitate their technological development is not, contrary to the claim, a form of ‘educational

outreach’.

Similarly, the $100 laptop originally developed by the MIT media lab (the ‘One Laptop Per Child’ initiative) is a

result of the discourse that equates access to technology with development. It has been suggested that the

laptop would help children in developing countries leapfrog shortcomings in their educational infrastructure, when

the under-investment in this infrastructure has in itself resulted in poor literacy among students. Their inability to
read limits their ability to use the internet productively! A better model of access is provided by taking heed of the

social contexts of literacy – understood as gaining mastery over the processes by which culturally significant

information is coded and decoded. But using such an understanding to customize solutions based on a realistic

skills and competency analysis is not time and cost effective. The perceived solution then is the ‘dumbing down’

of existing technologies and processes so that they can be made cheaper for wider access. The $100 laptop then

is a product conceived by designers from within their own cultural perspectives.

AfH is closely related toWorldchanging in its sensibility and through its connection to AfH founder, Cameron

Sinclair. Both organisations share a glowing positivity and the ‘can do’ attitude of technical determinism. A closer

look shows that the thinking about long-term, change for sustainability is cursory at best. They share an

astonishingly resilient belief in technology’s ability to facilitate ‘collective intelligence’. In the recent (2006)

Worldchanging publication, Hassan Masum sums up this belief: “with enough eyes, all problems are shallow”.

Yet even if we are ‘global citizens’ with the means to travel extensively in physical and virtual environments, we

don’t automatically develop a god’s eye view. We are still products of our own histories and contexts and see

problems from our own cultural perspectives.

Access – whether to IT or to housing – is one thing, implementation another. Sustainment, what Ezio Manzini has

called the ‘regenerative potential’ of a design, doesn’t appear to be part of the picture. In sum, the solutions

offered by AfH are largely based on the assumption of a homogenous global population with common values.

AfH is well-meaning, but too self-congratulatory, assured and lacking in caution. It sorely needs a mechanism for

reflection.

Abby Mellick Lopes and Gaurang Desai both teach in Design & Technology and Industrial Design at the

University of Western Sydney.