“Pro bono architect”, Michiel Smits wants to challenge the very model of modern-day Development Aid which he perceives as top-down and capitalistic. “We’re trying to penetrate this wall of ‘I’m the expert, I know what is right and although you can’t do this yourself, we’ll pay people from outside to do it for you’.” Much better to assess people’s existing knowledge and capacities, and then advise them how to improve, suggests Smits who is currently helping people in remote African communities build and maintain better houses for themselves.

People want “modern houses”

Chepchoina is a village lying high on the slopes of Mount Elgon in western Kenya, just five minutes walk from the border with Uganda, and 90 minutes drive from the nearest town. In this remote community, 75% of the inhabitants live in mud-based huts built according to traditional or ‘vernacular’ architecture, using the same materials and techniques that have been used for centuries. And the traditional design can also be unsuitable for the climate; for instance at 2000 metres altitude, the temperature in these Mt. Elgon communities drops sharply at night and people get sick because of draughts blowing through massive cracks in the walls of their current houses. “Yet these inhabitants continue using old techniques to build and repair their houses simply because they don’t know how to improve them themselves.” In a recently conducted survey of 200 households, Smits discovered that families are unhappy with their houses and want modern ones, but as these require skilled labour and non-local materials, they are just too expensive.

Improving on traditional architecture

So Smits, who works part-time as a lecturer in the Netherlands to support his PhD study, has set up a research project which involves finding out first what the local people already know about building houses and what they have, and then advising them on how they could build a better house based on those capabilities. This contrasts with the more conventional ‘top-down’ development aid approach, which prioritises building institutions instead of making direct improvements to the local inhabitants’ quality of life. “In many development aid projects, it’s often decided – without consulting the people who live there – that a community needs a hospital. So people raise funds, bring in an architect and build it.” Then later, when the aid organisation wants to pass on the running of these projects to the local communities, there are usually “kind of obvious” problems, says Smits, “bearing in mind that these people live in extreme poverty in a mud shack. And these people are supposed to run a facility to a western European level? There’s no way that these projects can just be handed on to the local community.”