Dwellings - are they houses or homes?


What is a dwelling?  It is ‘a building or place of shelter to live in, a place of residence, abode, home’.  It’s a slightly strange word, not commonly used in first world countries, where usually people refer to the type of dwelling live in – this allows a view of the type of property, and also slightly denotes its characteristics and potentially it’s value. 

The word dwelling seems to me to denote a more humble and pressing solution to human need.  Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs includes five levels – physiological needs, safety needs, belongness and love, esteem and self-actualisation.  A dwelling provides a number of inputs to these levels – if we have a dwelling, we have shelter, security, safety, a feeling of accomplishment, and an opportunity to feel like we have achieved something – getting a home, and providing shelter for loved ones.  Lack of a dwelling place impacts heavily on human need fulfilment.

In developing countries, dwellings can meet the same needs, but may be a very different structure or size than developed country dwellers have.   A dwelling may provide only basic needs, rather than providing an opportunity to demonstrate wealth or success.

In recent years a movement has emerged to use plastic bottles as building materials.  These are known as ecobricks.   Waste plastic bottles (any size) can be packed with small plastic pieces, packed tightly, layer by layer.   

The use of ecobricks has emerged from a number of local initiatives where waste plastic products were a growing issue and need for dwellings also a growing issue, this from widely dispersed counties like the Philippines, Nicaragua, New Mexico, India, Serbia and Argentina.  In Northern Philippines, a project applied ancestral ecological principles of the Igorots for building rice terraces, integrating cradle to grave principles into the build methodology.    This means that the ecoblocks can be also be re-used, so from a waste plastic bottle comes a reusable material to provide dwellings. 


In desert areas in Algeria, dwellings have been constructed that provide shelter from the sun and wind for 90,000 long term refugees from western Sahara.  The bottles are filled with sand cement and straw, and provide thermal insulation.  Sand and cement mix are used to hold the bottles together.  Dwellings are constructed in circular shapes to prevent dunes forming during sandstorms and reduce the impact of solar rays.  One dwelling uses around 6,000 bottles and takes a team of four around a week to build.

So to be considered a dwelling, a structure must provide the basics of shelter.  However, for most people a dwelling is also a home.  Although the definition of home is a place where one lives permanently, it has a more emotional meaning relating to feelings of happiness, security and ideally love.

A home provides a sense of belonging that has nothing to do material value of the building itself.  Ecobrick dwellings are likely to be homes – places of safety, security and shelter where families live together.    

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Four Idols

Image
  Francis Bacon was an English scholar and philosopher who lived from 1561 To 1626. Amongst other things he wrote and thought about thinking.   I was Googling “idols” and Francis Bacon’s Four Idols kept cropping up, so I read a bit about them and it seemed very difficult and complicated. Then I kept on reading about them and actually it’s not that difficult, in fact I think it’s really interesting.   As I said, Francis Bacon thought about thinking and, long before the birth of modern psychology, he understood that the human mind doesn’t always reason correctly. He argued that this fact needed to be understood before new ideas could be developed.   He advocated using inductive reasoning and experiments to gain insight and to prove or disprove a theory.   He wrote a book called Novum Organum and in it he outlined the Four Idols which (I think) basically described four major errors in mental processing that result in obstacles to new and innovative thinkin...
Read more
Image
  Propagation, oo-oo-oo Propagation Propagation's what you need, If you want to plant a seed, make a rose bush or a reed, Propagation’s what you need! If you’d like to make new roots, or grow some tasty fruits, Propagation’s what you need! If you want to grow a plant, but think that you can’t, Oo-oo propagation's what you need! Do you want to be a propagate-er, Ooooo!!! For those of a certain age, you may have broken into song. Memories of Roy Castle and the McWhirter brothers on Record Breakers have been (dare I say it?) propagated in your mind!   Plants for free! There are lots of different ways in which plants can be propagated; the most common is by sowing seeds, after all, this is how it is usually done in nature. Because seed production relies on flowers producing seed by combining male pollen with female ovule, the resulting seed may produce a plant with different coloured flowers from the mother plant’s, leaves might be larger or smaller, ...
Read more