Sustainable Housing & Infrastructure

Sustainable Construction in Humanitarian Action

Existing technologies and systems supporting more sustainable construction are not suited to the conflict-​affected, often resource-​strapped settings where the ICRC works. This project will adapt and extend existing technologies and systems that promote sustainable construction to provide guidance on how to use environmental impact assessment tools in humanitarian action. Moreover, it will develop a digital platform that supports the sustainable design, operation, and maintenance of humanitarian buildings and infrastructure. The goal of this project is to improve the sustainability of ICRC construction projects, particularly for water and local habitat.

Focus Region: Global

Contact: Prof. Guillaume Habert

Partners: external page Dr. André Ullal (external page Building2050 group, EPFL), Pavlos Tamvakis (external page ICRC)

ETH4D Grant: Humanitarian Action Challenges Grant

Low-cost Monitoring of Critical Infrastructures

One of the significant challenges facing critical civil infrastructures in Ghana is the absence of an efficient and reliable inspection and monitoring framework for tracking the health of infrastructure(s). This project seeks to develop a low-cost sensor-based Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) system to aid the Ghana Highway Authority (GHA) in inspecting and monitoring bridges in the country.

The project's primary objective is to develop a monitoring-supported bridge inspection framework, and to provide recommendations for integrating the developed framework into GHA's bridge maintenance program. The anticipated outcomes of this project include a low-cost sensor-based SHM framework for improving safety and longevity of highway bridges, as well as reducing the maintenance and repair costs for the GHA. This project could potentially position Ghana as a leader in assimilation of SHM techniques for critical infrastructures in the West Africa sub-region. The project aligns with resilience and sustainability objectives, as it seeks to deliver diagnostic tools and methods, which will help to save money on repairs and prevent catastrophic failures.

Focus Country: Ghana

Contact: Dr. Vasileios Ntertimanis

Partners: external page Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, external page Ghana Highway Authority

ETH4D Grant: ETH4D Pilot Grant

New Public Lighting for Informal Settlements

Rapid urbanization worldwide has led to public service challenges that disproportionately affect residents of informal and poor neighborhoods. While much work focuses on access to water, sanitation, and electricity, public lighting is a neglected topic in research and policymaking. Few informal neighborhoods have sufficient public lighting, yet it might play an important role in enabling people to feel safe outside at night as well as in accessing shared basic services, like toilets or water taps.

This transdisciplinary project, which is a collaboration between the ETH Development Economics Group and the ETH Institute for Science, Technology, and Policy (ISTP), uses a field experiment to test the efficacy of a new public lighting technology — solar lights mounted onto residents’ houses — in an informal settlement in Cape Town, South Africa. The idea for using outdoor solar lights as a public lighting solution was developed as part of ISTP PhD student Stephanie Briers’s doctoral work.

In Cape Town, the majority of informal settlements receive public lighting from 30-40 meter tall high-mast lights, typically used for stadiums, despite the technology’s failure to provide sufficient light in dense, urban spaces. The project both qualitatively and quantitatively evaluates the impact of improved public lighting on life at night, in particular, mobility, outdoor activities, and perceived safety.

The technology could also be a solution for other cities in Africa, many of which lack public lighting in informal neighborhoods altogether. The findings from this research will provide the City of Cape Town’s government with information on the suitability of an environmentally sustainable public lighting technology alternative for informal settlements. In addition, the results will inform the work of civil society, in particular, the Social Justice Coalition, a Cape Town-based NGO, as well as local light manufacturers interested in new markets for solar lighting.

Focus Country: South Africa

Contact: Prof. Isabel Günther

Project partners: external page Social Justice Coalition, external page City of Cape Town Public Lighting Department, external page LEDwise Lighting

ETH4D Grant:  ETH4D Research Challenges Grant

Low-Cost Sustainable CEB Dwellings

The world is currently undergoing an ecological crisis of unprecedented scale and urgency, in which building and construction are responsible for 40% of all carbon emissions in the world [1]. Existing advances in sustainable dwellings usually involve high-tech equipment used by highly skilled workers on-site, which may not be suitable for less developed countries, for example Morocco. This project aims to provide a customizable design and simple construction process that enables local workers in Morocco to build sustainable, low-cost housing with locally available earth material.

Earth buildings provide good comfort and have minimal embodied energy as well as a light environmental impact. Morocco has abundant earth resources and vernacular earth architecture. However, using earth for constructing dwellings has been gradually abandoned since the introduction of concrete. Despite recent attempts to bring back earth construction with rammed earth and compressed earth blocks (CEB), the material is usally stabilized with cement. Often, the structural components made of earth are also only used for the walls and another material and construction technique for the roof is needed, which can make up 50% of the cost of the entire building construction [2].

In research conducted by the project team over the past two years, a parametric design template is proposed that enables a mortarless CEB dwelling where the wall and roof systems are built with the same technique and material, thus reducing demands on infrastructure, materials, and building skills [3]. This work will now be adapted to the Moroccan context by determining an appropriate architectural layout that can be built with only a few interlocking CEB block types to simplify the construction process. To enable an existing conventional CEB press to fabricate customized CEBs, this research investigates how to make the minimum modifications to a conventional CEB press. A small-scale, raw earth structure was constructed successfully in the summer of 2022 at ETH using a limited number of 3D printed molds to make interlocking CEB block types using a manual CEB press. A full-scale prototype will be developed and built together with our local partner in Morocco in the intended culture, context and climate. This is vital to demonstrate the potential of our approach to a wider audience thus, leading to greater potential impact in low resource settings.

This research will demonstrate a balanced combination of new technologies and conventional processes to enable the design and fabrication of bespoke and efficient architecture in the context of developing countries. It makes the design and construction of a broader range of innovative and sustainable structures more accessible, affordable and adaptable to all.

Focus Country: Morocco

Contact: Prof. Kristina Shea

Partners: external page Arup (United Kingdom), external page Gianni Botsford Architects (United Kingdom), external page Cooperative Belarej and Argilex Sarl (Morocco)

ETH4D Grant: ETH4D Research Challenges Grant

References:
[1] World Green Building Council. 2019. “Bringing Embodied Carbon Upfront.” Accessed September 13, 2021. https://www.worldgbc.org/embodied-carbon.
[2] UN-HABITAT. 2019. “Interlocking Stabilised Soil Blocks: Appropriate Earth Technologies in Uganda.” Adrián Mauricio Pérez-Peña
[3] Zhang, Y., Tatarintseva, L., Clewlow, T., Clark, E., Botsford, G., Shea, K., “Mortarless Compressed Earth Block Dwellings: A Low‐Cost Sustainable Design and Fabrication Process”, ACADIA 2021 (In press).

 

 

 

Digital Sustainability for Informal Settlements

South Africa's urban population is rapidly growing, leading urban migrants to often settle in underserved peri-urban areas, exacerbating the challenge of insufficient sustainable housing solutions amidst a construction industry ranked high in greenhouse gas emissions. While digital technologies offer potential solutions to this challenge, particularly in terms of efficiency and sustainability, applications so far have primarily focused on upper middle-income countries, leaving questions unanswered about their applicability in informal construction, highlighting the need for further exploration of how digital fabrication tools could be effectively used in such contexts.

This project aims to develop a practical approach for introducing digital fabrication tools into informal settlements in South Africa, focusing on material reuse, while engaging the local community in design and implementation. The expected outcome is the construction of a physical demonstrator built from reused materials using digital fabrication tools, such as 3D printing. These results would be important for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers engaged in participatory development and informal settlement upgrading. This project can guide future collaborative endeavours, establishing ethical and effective strategies for leveraging digital fabrication in informal settlements.

Focus Country: South Africa

Contact: Prof. Catherine De Wolf

Partners: external page School of Built Environment and Development Studies - University of KwaZulu-Natal, external page Drip Additive Manufacturing

ETH4D Grant: ETH4D Pilot Grant