Natural Build Conference, USA, 2018
On every continent and in tandem with globalisation, building with industrial, highly-processed materials has gradually supplanted the ubiquitous local raw material. Economic imperatives led to overly extractive and wasteful processes, and in my view, a wilful ignorance toward associated environmental and social costs. As Herman Daly, former Senior Economist at the World Bank, argues “by neglecting finite limits and our dependence on the planetary biosphere, economists are able to assume that growth can go on forever”(Suzuki, 2003, p. 115).
The mass- production and mass-marketing of ‘efficient’ modular alternatives has contributed to a degradation of the natural environment, and paradoxically in low-middle income countries, has also resulted in a less affordable housing stock, associated with increasingly unaffordable maintenance costs (Barbacci, 2020).
Adaptive Settlements
Interdependent Thinking
Gondwana Link rewilding_Australia
Sadhana Forest rewilding_India + Kenya
White Gum Valley development_Australia
Self-building Technologies