David Le Page AFRICAN FRONTIERS To slow the melting of the polar ice-caps, build some ceilings in Soweto. This is one of the implications of a study on environmentally friendly low-cost housing recently commissioned by the national Department of Housing. But it’s not the most important – making home environments more comfortable is a far more immediately important goal for energy- efficient housing. The study promises to help reach three extremely significant goals: make low- income housing far more comfortable year- round, reduce energy usage – and, most importantly, reduce the incidence of respiratory disease. Southern African children suffer 27 times the incidence of respiratory disease of their European counterparts.
The report was done by the United States Agency for International Development (USAid).
Awareness of this issue is by no means confined to South Africa. According to a recent World Health Organisation (WHO) study, rural villagers in developing countries are at far greater risk from air pollution than people living in industrialised countries because they tend to live right on top of cooking fires in small, poorly ventilated homes. Health problems follow from the particulate, or smoke, produced by coal or paraffin fires. Because these are burnt in small, closed spaces, the result is often an oxygen shortage, leading to partial combustion and the production of carbon monoxide.
The WHO said that as many as 500 000 children a year die in Southern Africa from respiratory infections caused by the household use of solid fuel such as wood or coal.
Quite apart from these deaths, by burning huge amounts of coal to produce some of the world’s cheapest electricity, South Africa manages to be the world’s 15th-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. The country is a signatory to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and related Kyoto Protocol, but, as USAid concedes, national priorities do not include rebuilding the power-generating infrastructure. Hence the decision to concentrate on finding ways for the country to reduce energy consumption. Funded by USAid and carried out by the University of the Witwatersrand, the study came up with a number of suggestions on how low-cost housing could be designed to reduce the amount of energy required for heating – not to mention what would be spent on cooling could people afford it. So exactly how does one build a low-cost house to warm the cockles of a Greenpeace heart?
Daniel Irurah of the Wits department of architecture says it’s largely a matter of common sense and insulation. Firstly, an extraordinary proportion of low-cost housing does not face north, losing out dramatically on winter warmth from the sun. Often windows are too large, letting out, and in, too much heat. Changing these design flaws would not cost developers any more and the housing department hopes to make such improvements mandatory. Another important strategy is building ceilings, packing those ceilings with insulation and insulating the walls. The USAid study proposes a polystyrene cladding on outer walls, which can then be plastered for strength and durability. These measures would add perhaps R5E000 to the cost of a basic R19E000 house. That figure represents a huge problem, which the housing department must now set about justifying in terms of savings on energy consumption and health spending. But there is already some progress towards developing a small loan scheme that would enable residents to pay for individual improvements.
Perhaps the simplest way of reducing that extra cost is to build what the department calls row housing, but might be better off calling town houses. Building homes right alongside each other has extraordinary cost benefits. But while such terraced housing is acceptable in northern suburbs townhouse developments, research shows it is often seen as a second-best option carrying negative associations with hostels for low-income homeowners.
But sharing walls, cutting building costs and reducing the surface area over which heat can be lost could completely eliminate that extra R5E000 if people can be persuaded to accept those benefits rather than opting for a stand-alone “proper house”.
Row houses also result in huge savings in infrastructure – roads, sewerage and electricity – and help cut transport costs by reducing suburban distances. Irurah believes even once expensive options such as solar-generated electricity will become more practical for low-cost housing, while Eskom is already running a programme to take solar power to communities that are unlikely to be connected to the national grid.
None of these ideas would be worth much were they not practical to implement. But they have already been used successfully in different non-government housing projects around the country. Among the nine provincial housing departments that of the Free State has shown particular interest in putting them into practice and leaving the coals in Newcastle. E-mail the editor: [email protected]