• • 17 January 2017
• Competitions , archiDATUM News , News ,

Evidence of a rising middle class abound in Sub-Sahara Africa’s largest cities. However, there is another story: uncomfortable and increasingly often less told. The story of Africa’s urban poor. It estimated that today, Two third of the population in Africa’s cities and townships live on less than US$3.10/day.

Almost universally, housing supply has failed to respond to the need of this significant and legitimate population. The cost of new housing including those built by Government Agencies are significantly in excess of what this segment of the population can afford. The consequence is the rapid growth of informal settlements, slums on the edge of Africa’s major cities with obvious consequences for economic development, health, safety and security.

As Africa’s primary Housing Development Finance Institution this challenge presents an opportunity for Shelter Afrique to lead a result focused debate on how the housing market can be made to work for the more than 300m Africans including women and children who are currently unserved. But beyond the debate, we now want to work with partners to promote innovation in low income housing developments in Sub-Sahara Africa.

As an initial step towards this commitment Shelter Afrique is promoting an International DESIGN +DEVELOPMENT completion. The following sections describe our overall concept and framework for the competition ahead of a detailed Competition Brief.

The Aim and Objectives
The aim of the competition is to stimulate and reward innovative thinking about how a livable and sustainable home can be designed and produced at a capital cost of no more than US$5000 equivalent to the end user. In addition to the cost parameter, the Competition’s key themes will include but are not limited to:

• Sustainability – The design solution will give important consideration to the environment, cost in use and adaptability to specific location contexts;
• Practicability – The homes will be buildable;
• Supply Chain Innovation – The proposed solutions will propose innovation along each part of the supply chain towards achieving the objective;
• Beauty and Aesthetic – Inspire a new urban aesthetic and landscape that empowers and uplifts people on low income.

Shelter Afrique’s objectives and anticipated outcomes from the initiative are as follows:

• Access to a replicable model of a US$5000 home (at 2016 prices) and urban planning to underpin large scale low income housing programme including over 1miilion homes across Sub-Sahara Africa by 2025.
• Development of a sustainable supply chain able to support a large scale low income housing delivery programme whilst at the same time creating new jobs.

Competition Entries

The Competition will be open to all nationalities and anyone including individuals, team of designers, artists, architects, engineers etc. We will be looking for cross-disciplinary teams collectively able to respond to the diverse challenges posed by the Competition