Bridging the Gap

The term technology most likely conjures up notions of gleaming metals, machines, mobile devices, the formidable MIT and Minority Report’s Captain John Anderton (Tom Cruise) orchestrating law and order through virtual interfaces. A quick search through Google loads thousands of blue-black images of digital matrices promising the world at your fingertips.The questions of technology have been deeply ingrained in the debates of our future as well as our cities. However, the dominance of this imagery and these gadgets makes it easier to forget that most of them are still the privilege of a minority. The all-pervasive conventional notion of technology misses the very essence of the term, and its everyday reality as it plays out for (and against) a huge majority of the world population.And yet, despite the concerted blow of global technologies to flatten the world smack smooth, grains of local textures emerge.

When Hassan Fathy, one of the most significant Egyptian architects, was designing (160 projects comprising residences to entire townships) and when he set the founding principles of the Institute of Appropriate Technology for architecture in the late 1970s, not many would have called him a futurist. For his belief lay not in the advanced potential of reinforced concrete – a material quickly gaining popularity among his contemporaries – but rather in the inherent sustainable, ecological, economic and humane values of earthen dwellings. Semantics of materials aside, these would be the very concerns of the world four decades from his time. 

Rather different in education, circumstances and demeanor, Didi Contractor is a highly regarded architect, albeit self-taught, living and working in Sidhbari on the outskirts of Dharamshala, North India, who asserts a similar faith in the local materials and building traditions. Her projects of hand-labor and sun- dried mud bricks squint seductively in the face of the modern metropolis glitterati. In 1990, before ‘sustainability’ became the buzzword, veteran architect Chitra Vishwanath established her practice on the then humble principles of ecology and collaborative technologies in Bengaluru and has since impelled the movement through her wholesome projects and disciplinary engagement.

In 2005, Diébédo Francis Kéré, a German- trained architect from a small West African town of Gando formed Kéré Architecture in Berlin; he actively pursues reinvesting his knowledge of building design back into his home community in Africa. Over the past half-century, these scattered events across the map have been gathering momentum beyond the realm of conventional technologies, privileging local, small-scale and cultural narratives in built-form instrumented through appropriate technologies.

Appropriate Technology covers a bricolage of concepts broadly recognized as an “encompassing technological choice and application that is small-scale, decentralized, labor-intensive, energy-efficient, environmentally sound and locally controlled” (Hazeltine and Bull 1999). The economist Dr E.F. Schumacher first articulated it in 1973. Lesser known though, Mahatma Gandhi scripted its codes and is cited as the father of the appropriate technology movement. His model of empowering villages through indigenous knowledge of materials, skills and ecology as well as his belief in self-reliance form the crux of the varied definitions of this people-centric technology. 

While the globe- trotting, urban technophile in us may be skeptical of the seemingly lofty orthodoxy or brush-off such an arrière-garde position, the concepts of appropriate technology are founded on a much meaningful, ‘contemporary’ discourse and are ushering a quiet revolution in the world, possibly to compensate for the limitations of the present built environment.

Much has been said of the present crisis of the urban condition. Limited agency of master- planning and policies is evident in the slums, squalor and concrete sprawls. Suburban concrete containers, pretentiously comfortable in their plastic paints and air-conditioners, while in denial of co-existence and environment, have propelled the cities into spatial and spiritual mundanity. At a physical level, urban studies have reached an ideological impasse, facing their own limitations. On a non-material level, the project of cities has been overtaken by the discourse of smart cities and intelligent technology.

Architect-urbanist Rem Koolhaas recently underscored the palpable, “the rhetoric of smart cities would be more persuasive if the environment that the technology companies create was actually a compelling one that offered models for what the city can be”. Unarguable, old rain trees shaded Bengaluru streets would win hands down against the new gated IT glass communities. That is not to recklessly propose a future city without smart technologies, but only to reveal its realistic possibilities and in doing so, to reclaim a niche for the discipline of urban design in what was hitherto its own domain. Most urgently, the looming environmental crisis, the continuing exponential growth of urban population and alarming levels of pollution in cities raise fundamental questions not only on the technological choices of our cities but also of the ethical and ontological principles underpinning these choices. Complementary to other forms of tactical and smart urbanism, appropriate technology positions itself above this apparent gulf between the material, the ecological and the digital.

Championing these philosophies – to plan considering the natural elements, passively and actively and to render the social impact of construction positive – architect Chitra Vishwanath’s projects are deliberated processes improving lifestyle quality of both the doers and the users. Depending on the soil quality of the site, her building materials include mud bricks, stabilized adobe bricks, compressed earth blocks or stabilized rammed earth.

The evident genius of earth as a building material is its immediate availability from the site itself. Mario Botta’s dictum about ‘building a site’ rather than building on it takes a literal expression in Chitra’s process of earth-from-basement to construction-material. At a conceptual level, it is incredible to imagine structures built by rearrangement of the very soil of the site that they stand on, evoking spatial-spiritual continuity with the earth. Biome, the parent company she leads with her practice, also works extensively on all building services involving ‘poop and pee’ (as she quips) to water management as well as solar and wind energy generation systems. Her most incredible contribution is the concept of ‘waste sink’ buildings that become basins of urban waste –plastic waste in the foundation becomes a water- proofing layer, while computer and technological wastes are employed creatively to replace and reduce conventional materials like cement. These homes are about letting nature play, creating conditions for biodiversity, attracting local plants and birds and celebrating light and rain. The coy tree in the open living space of Pratibha and Sanjay’s house, light filtering through the mud-brick louvers of Mathru School for the Blind, the tactile ‘sparsh’ (sensation of touch) of rammed earth walls of Hamsa House which lure one’s eyes and hand to glide through - phenomenology of spaces abound her modest homes.

Appropriate technology can be approached in a myriad ways, as diverse as their contexts of application and ingenuity of their proponents. Diébédo Francis Kéré, the internationally acclaimed architect, brought universal values to the door of the remote town of Gando in West Africa. He approaches the concepts of appropriate technology as a tool for local empowerment. He has partnered closely with local communities to build schools, housing and projects of urban scale as well as hosted exchanges and workshops for construction by combining traditional Burkinabé building technologies with modern engineering methods, exemplifying the potential for local innovation.

Austrian architect Anna Haringer’s works emphasizes her belief in small-scale for big changes. Her notable project (in collaboration with Eike Roswag), a two-storied school in rural Bangladesh is a creative kinesthetic act of hand building with loam, straw, bamboo and nylon lashing along with the local community. One of the loam worker’s sentiments echoes the cultural and technological crosscurrents that transpire on the field: “I learned how to build strong walls, how to use measurement tools and the foreigners learnt that the best mixing machines are water buffalos.”

It is certain by now that a lopsided faith in technology transfer from developed countries to the lesser-developed world, amplifies third- world thinking and erodes local economies, leaving the receiver more dependent. What merits appropriate technology is not its efficiency of time or capital, that being the case with the normal sense of modern technology. In many cases it may even seem to defy rationale by being less efficient. However, it is the empowering of individual, social, economic and artistic facets that brings forth its long-term value to the communities. Enthused by a similar belief, albeit through reviving entrepreneurial spirit in the local youth, architect Richardo Belho has set off a bamboo revolution in the hinterlands of Nagaland, training youths in bamboo construction, partnering with government for skill development and construction R&D. These low impact buildings need not always be sepia toned earthlings. Projects in Africa and Haiti by Boston-based Mass Design Group may score less on complete use of natural ‘cradle-to-cradle’ materials, but involve all stages of community partnership, local economy-stimulating construction techniques as well as use of passive design strategies for light, ventilation, water-treatment and spatial aesthetics.

There is a certain attribute of indigenous materials that augments social comfort and invokes an intuitive sense of beauty and pride. 

A person of an ethnic community may feel threatened and alienated by a shining glass and aluminum entity, whereas feel a sense of pride at a building that he has participated in building with say local thatch.

Abandoning rigid classes of gated communities, collaborative technologies weave porous urban fabric, where social thresholds are comfortable to be crossed. It allows for affordable urban constructions, respecting the local economics, be it barter systems or other means of contribution, thereby rendering the communities self-sufficient rather than in debt. To list the sustainability quotient of this approach is a futile attempt at stating the obvious or worse still a risk of reducing its value to market-driven clichés. The collaborative processes of appropriate technology essentially stage the coming together of communities with an agency to solve their problems through negotiation, with the architect or urban designer’s role as a mediator with a universal perspective.

Distancing from the dialectics of tradition versus progress and the limited discourse that entails, appropriate technology privileges the notion of a continuous genealogical evolution of the ‘way of life’. Within its purview, progress is paramount, but not at the cost of human dignity, equity or environment. Moving beyond sentiments of vernacular nostalgia or avant-garde excitement, its scope starts from finding pragmatic, creative and contemporary solutions through engaging with technology that is more sensitive to its context and people. In many of these locales, appropriate and sustainable models are not an added value but a dire need. However, it must be reiterated that the ideology of appropriate technology has to steer clear of the exotic, non-critical reproduction out of its context; needless to say, a bamboo house in the hot and dry climate of north India would be an unsuitable interpretation to be avoided on equally ethical grounds. So also, the repetition of the vernacular image devoid of universal values; narrow-minded replication of ethnic form will stagnate traditions, harden differences and encourage cultural intolerance; such a stance could prevent the future generation of these localities from assimilation with the contemporary world.

Fundamentally, concepts of appropriate technology provide a valid critical pivot around which multitudinous praxis of scientific knowledge, local crafts, materiality, folk wisdom and orally transferred knowledge can be enacted simultaneously. One would be tempted to hail appropriate technology as a global movement but that would be an over-estimation of the concept and more so of the global movements themselves. Its virtuosity does not depend on a universal model, rather it evolves from the idiosyncrasies and complexities of small-scale of the neighborhood. Appreciation of appropriate technology and recognizing its role is only a point of departure. Its integration in the mainstream urbanism requires developing comprehensive scientific culture, advocacy theories, policies, skill development and studies as well as its relative understanding with other fields of anthropology, human settlements, habitats, heritage and ecology.

Most exciting though, the contemporary potential of appropriate technologies reveals itself in the light of digital media and globalism. 

A rooted understanding of a locality conjures up adaptive features that apply across cultures and can be replicated in different indigenous contexts. 

The methodologies and technologies of these simultaneous practices can be compared, contradicted, contrasted and learnt from, negotiating an authentic global dialogue. It opens up a hitherto unavailable opportunity to connect indigenous building practices with international agencies having similar ambition but different limited means. As diverse expressions of such localized responses gather momentum, they offer an ideological and a process-oriented approach that overrides the dogmatism of a single model, to address global urban concerns with a mature differentiation. The promise of this approach is not in dialectic opposite to digital technologies or futurism but in more nuanced and complementary associations where individual personhood, societies, governments and smart cities converge to create more humane and inherently sustainable urban environments.