IMAGINE1 - Indian Ocean Development Architects

9 March, 2020.

I have continued my career path as an architect, and have my own practice up and running for 5 or 6 years now. It’s starting to reach maturity. We are based in Mauritius, but use our island as a central jump-off point to be implementing projects throughout the Indian Ocean, and the Indian Ocean Rim – potential for development abounds in Madagascar, Mozambique, Kenya, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Somalia, as well as on the Asian side of the ocean - India, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.

The key to realising a places potential is to strengthening its communities, and so our development projects are intricately involved in empowering communities. Each project is examined for its own potentials and challenges, but as an example I’ll describe a recent (2019) example in Madagascar. We went in after a village had been torn apart by a cyclone, set up a community centre to teach sustainable, low-tech, building techniques and organic farming techniques to the locals, over the course of about 2 growing seasons the village was providing food for surrounding areas, as well as earning a fair bit of money exporting the excess. People are now moving away from farming, which is producing a great amount of food, and we are helping set up subsidiary businesses – from logistics to marketing to banking, as well as businesses that move the village away from their dependence on farming (such as eco-tourism operations and marine- and forest- conservation and rehabilitation projects). We focus on architecture as an enabling mechanism to bring systems together, but also work with the locals to put those systems in place. As such, our plans for a project are constantly evolving, from constant interaction with the stakeholders on the ground and various changing influencing factors.

This morning Alchemy called. The rumours about the Tokyo food crisis are real! This is going to be a big challenge – the population density of Tokyo brings with it a massive ecological footprint. We have a team brainstorming it right now. We need to reduce the eco-footprint of each individual, cutting out as much meat as possible while still maintaining a healthy diet for them. We need to get individuals to grow their own food where possible, although this will only be part of the solution in such a dense urban environment – people growing high-nutrient foods in window boxes or hydroponic cupboards in their apartments. A bigger scale needs to be implemented at the same time – such as high-rise farm towers producing things such as rice, fish, and wheat – all of which need large fields to produce sufficient quantities. Sides of buildings, roofs of buildings, and every other available surface must be put towards healthy, organic agriculture.

We will report back as soon as we have a clearer picture of the problem.