Advancing full-culm bamboo through architectural design education to achieve SDG11.1 in tropical LMIC’s

This project looks to develop new models of architectural design education for tropical LMIC’s, as a means to normalise bamboo as a construction material, and raise the capacities of the architecture profession as protagonist designers for bamboo, to achieve SDG11.1. Globally, one in eight people live in non-adequate housing and this number could increase to 3 billion by 2050. Tropical LMIC’s are some of the poorest and most vulnerable societies to natural disasters and by 2050 the tropics will be home to one half of humanity. Such countries are urbanising rapidly and in increasing quantities are consuming sand and cement which currently accounts for 8% of anisotropic CO2 emissions, yet produce a range of natural sustainable materials which are under-utilised in construction, such as bamboo, a material with good tensile and compressive properties. As designers we need to overcome societal attitudes, historic prejudices and natural variability. All factors which currently hinder full-culm bamboo, the natural unprocessed most sustainable form of bamboo, from being widely used in housing. This research is not about creating a design portfolio which can be parachuted into tropical LMIC’s from the Global North. For lasting change, a resilient built environment utilising local materials must be designed, engineered and constructed with the most limited and anonymous support from outside the LMIC by a new generation of locally educated architects. With Malaysia and Haiti as specific case studies for this research, this project looks to develop new models architectural design education ingraining computational design tools to work with materials with natural variability. This can provide efficient, practical and locally relevant design output by the next generation of architects, which is durable, functional and desirable. This can further the path to the normalisation of full-culm bamboo, regenerate ecologies, and encourage wider use of bamboo, to provide sustainable adequate urban housing in tropical LMIC’s, and achieve SDG 11.1.