Procuring structurally sound housing

Chairman: Ron Watermeyer
Secretary: Ben Cresswell Riol

Housing is central to any society’s well being. Adequate housing strengthens communities and provides a better setting in which to raise families. It improves health, educational achievement and employment opportunities and provides a long term asset which may be passed on to future generations. Houses have been designed and constructed using local indigenous materials to provide people with shelter from the elements. These traditional forms of construction have evolved over time into the commonly encountered houses that are seen in many countries. Most of these forms of construction are structurally sound and are well able to withstand what nature has to subjected it to.

Agenda 21, which flowed out of the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit (1992), recognized that access to safe and healthy shelter should be a fundamental part of national and international action. The Habitat Agenda (1996) linked locally available, appropriate, affordable, safe, efficient and environmentally sound construction methods and technologies that emphasize optimal use of local human resources to the concept of “sustainable construction”. The Johannesburg World Summit (2002) includes an action relating to the use of low-cost and sustainable materials and appropriate technologies for the construction of adequate and secure housing for the poor.

One of the targets set at the Johannesburg World Summit for poverty eradication seeks to achieve a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers by 2020. The proposed actions associated with this target include:

• improved access to adequate shelter and to basic services for the poor; and
• the use of low-cost and sustainable materials and appropriate technologies for the construction of adequate and secure housing for the poor, taking into account their culture, climate, specific social conditions and vulnerability to natural disasters.

It is intended that the publication will enable:

• structural engineers to design structurally sound housing in any part of the world irrespective of whether on not appropriate building codes are in place;
• purchasing authorities, including their specifiers, to define their needs in terms of the various structural parameters;
• regulating authorities to specify appropriate minimum performance requirements;
• certifiers to determine that the actual manufactured house will meet the performance levels expressed in terms of the parameters described in the publication;
• technical assessment organisations to establishment fitness for use of innovative housing systems that fall outside of current materials design codes and standards against an international benchmark;
• lending authorities to incorporate performance requirements in their conditions for providing loans;
• insurers to base their premiums and policy conditions in part on the certified performance levels of houses; and
• researchers and product developers to describe in quantitative terms the performance of housing systems or components thereof that are researched or developed.

The proposed publication should empower governments to regulate the building of new houses in such a manner that houses can withstand the loads to which they are likely to be subjected to and to accept non-traditional forms of construction in the event that a disaster occurs. It should also allow developers of new housing systems to quantify the performance of their housing systems in terms of an international benchmark. It will furthermore encourage researchers to quantify the performance of indigenous housing systems using local materials.

The document is planned for publication in 2009.

For further information contact Ben Cresswell Riol.