CAMILO CERRO’s research while affiliated with American University of Sharjah and other places

The UN estimates that 68% of the world population will live in urban areas by 2050, adding 2.5 billion people to already overcrowded cities. And prompting many countries to face challenges in meeting the needs of their growing urban populations. Reconciling urban sprawl, verticality and the lack of housing will force us to adapt to greater density and new housing typologies. With more and more people moving into cities, understanding the key trends in urbanization will be crucial in implementing the Sustainable Development goals proposed by the UN. To address the housing crisis, and to become less car and carbon dependent, countries need to densify its job-rich metro areas so that more people can afford to live there and walk, bike, or take public transportation to get to work and back. A sustainable set of solutions are needed that are designed to address a net positive and self-sufficient approach to dwelling. The idea that technology will fix complex and systemic problems like climate change, poverty, the housing crisis, or healthcare is simplistic if we do not also change our existing models of living. This is why co-housing is well suited to help by promoting social, and environmental sustainability while providing an adaptive new dwelling typology. In its urban form it could be designed to add density to urban areas that are facing a housing crisis while solving other sustainable issues. This paper will present how co-housing can manifest as a tool to help deal with the housing crisis while also addressing climate change and adding to the quality of life of its users. A shift has occurred toward building social bonds and mutual support in the immediate environment after the pandemic, all while reducing resource consumption to lessen our environmental impacts. This frame of mind is making co-housing more appealing than ever before. A housing typology with social justice at its center, that empowers work, commerce and culture should be a human right globally and the future of dwelling.

According to the United Nations, the world number of urban inhabitants is estimated to grow from the 3.9 billion at present, to 6.3 billion people by 2050. The vast majority of this population surplus is expected to be absorbed by informal settlements, where the inhabitants will have to deal with inadequate or non-existent water, health or sanitation systems. At present, more than 156 million urban dwellers, live without immediate access to water. A situation that can be remedied by implementing urban proposals following the principles of Urban Acupuncture, by which small scale interventions are designed to produce large scale social change. At any given time, there are 3.1 quadrillion gallons of water in the atmosphere which if tapped could solve water scarcity. The yearly humidity average of cities like Karachi in Pakistan or Mumbai in India is around 70%. Making them the perfect sites for the use of atmospheric water generator, since these devises are designed to produce water from humidity levels as low as 35%. A single atmospheric water generator can produce up to 5000 litters of clean filtered water a day. Each of the proposed architectural interventions presented below, would house a minimum of four generators, producing 20,000 liters of a water a day. Functioning as a hive, these water towers would be placed at multiple social nodes within an informal settlement, potentially solving the water crisis by producing clean, filtered, free, accessible water and by doing so eliminating health and sanitation issues. The proposed case study presented in this paper is the result of an ongoing evolution of ideas on social design, developed to address water scarcity in informal settlements while also trying to hybridize the proposed intervention to tackle other water related issues that deal with nutrition and access to food. The idea is to create a network of interdependent facilities that directly serve a large number of people through architectural interventions that require minimal maintenance and the possibility of creating local jobs while helping solve the water and food crisis in informal settlements around the developing world.

The United Nations projects that the world population will likely reach 10.9 billion by the end of the century on a planet ill prepared to provide shelter, health care and food and water for its inhabitants. To decrease the planets population, ensure the long-term continuation of our species and the survival of our evolutionary branch, humanity needs to become a multi-planetary species. By going off world to colonize the solar system, the first explorers and the later colonizers will need to inhabit environments designed specifically to preserve their psychological wellbeing. Developing design parameters based on psychological factors will be of paramount importance to help humans deal with long journeys through space, and to create relaxing habitats to help decrease the stress that planetary explorers will be subjected to. The design community needs to become a participant in this process because solely engineered spaces are not enough to develop a good mental and physical quality of life for space exploration. There has been a tendency, with few exceptions, to not include design as an important aspect of the development of the government funded space programs all around the world. It was not until private capital started participating on the field and saw the opportunity to involve the public, that designers were invited to help sell the ideas of space exploration. In the future, the participation of the designer will need to transcend the role of the beautifier and we will need to become involved in all aspects of design that relate to the psychological wellbeing of the explorers. The development of off-planetary architecture will help humanity transition and mentally adapt to foreign environments. We need to understand that off-world habitats will require design that conveys familiarity to aid with our survival and prosperity, but more importantly, to remind us where we came from.