MIT's $1,000 House Challenge Yields Results 203
An anonymous reader writes "MIT's $1k House Project is an extraordinary challenge to provide safe and healthy homes for the world's burgeoning population. The Pinwheel House (PDF), a student project which helped serve as a catalyst for the challenge, has been completed in China by architect Ying chee Chui. Students have come up with a dozen or so designs to meet the challenge and improve living conditions for not just emerging economies but larger nations as well."
Re:Mit is the problem, not the solution (Score:4, Insightful)
You sound like a sad little hippie who still has a chip on his shoulder because some jocks picked on him a decade or two prior.
Where I went to school, "jocks" wouldn't have passed the entrance exam. I dislike my elite past, but I'm not going to deny it.
What is wrong with competition?
What is right with competition? There are times when it seems to work but there is nothing inherently good about it.
And you propose a losers-distribute-winnings-equally environment?
You're paying no attention. I propose that the intelligent act out of a desire to achieve good things in their discipline rather than to profit. There are 7 billion people in the world - more than enough who are both clever and benevolent. We simply have no need of the "gr8 people like me need $$$ incentive to support you!" mantra any more - it's a more outdated idea than RIAA, which is why certain groups are trying so hard to cling on to it.
Re:Mit is the problem, not the solution (Score:2, Insightful)
Especially, what alternative system do you propose that provides an educational and scientific environment that is on par with or at least not substantially worse than that at the MIT?
I'll have a stab at this.
At a very basic level, MIT is a series of houses filled with smart people. Maybe also some special equipment is required. If so, we might have to find for example miners and truck drivers and people who know how to build the machines that can build that specialist equipment, unless those can be found in existence all ready.
There is nothing magic about the free market and capitalism. What it can conjure up by means of millions of entrepreneurs poking in the dark to see what will stick, could also be just decided together, organized together and done together. That kind of model has brought you the best encyclopedia and maps, it could be used for other things as well. Decentralized, democratic and unoppressive just do it-ism I call it. Sometimes I call it Ralph. It doesn't matter. Point is, it's a simple concept. Everyone gets to decide on everything. And we should try to do the right thing. (What is the right thing? I don't know, everyone should get to decide on that as we go along.)
Re:Mit is the problem, not the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
You're missing the point. What I meant was that when compared to say, my parents' generation, my generation clearly has to compete on a different level. When I was out of work straight after college my father was baffled by this, when he was that age jobs could be had by just going to a company you thought looked fun to work for and asking them for a job. And in the workplace these days the level of performance expected by each employee is higher (at least in a lot of white-collar jobs). Basically our (western) society has become a lot more competitive and for the average person I just don't think the everyday gains outweigh the cost.
Now yes, if you go back to the 19th century and the wave of industrialization that swept through the world things were worse, the point is that we took a few steps forward and then we started taking steps backwards again.
Solution? Talk to those you are trying to "help" (Score:5, Insightful)
The writers created a competition, asking students, architects and businesses to compete to design the best prototype for a $300 house (their original sketch was of a one-room prefabricated shed, equipped with solar panels, water filters and a tablet computer). The winner will be announced this month. But one expert has been left out of the competition, even though her input would have saved much time and effort for those involved in conceiving the house: the person who is supposed to live in it [in Mumbai] We recently showed around a group of Dartmouth students involved in the project who are hoping to get a better grasp of their market. They had imagined a ready-made constituency of slum-dwellers eager to buy a cheap house that would necessarily be better than the shacks they’d built themselves. But the students found that the reality here is far more complex than their business plan suggested. To start with, space is scarce. There is almost no room for new construction or ready-made houses. Most residents are renters, paying $20 to $100 a month for small apartments. Those who own houses have far more equity in them than $300 — a typical home is worth at least $3,000. Many families have owned their houses for two or three generations, upgrading them as their incomes increase. With additions, these homes become what we call “tool houses,” acting as workshops, manufacturing units, warehouses and shops. They facilitate trade and production, and allow homeowners to improve their living standards over time. None of this would be possible with a $300 house, which would have to be as standardized as possible to keep costs low. No number of add-ons would be able to match the flexibility of need-based construction. In addition, construction is an important industry in neighborhoods like Dharavi. Much of the economy consists of hardware shops, carpenters, plumbers, concrete makers, masons, even real-estate agents. Importing pre-fabricated homes would put many people out of business, undercutting the very population the $300 house is intended to help. Worst of all, companies involved in producing the house may end up supporting the clearance and demolition of well-established neighborhoods to make room for it. The resulting resettlement colonies, which are multiplying at the edges of cities like Delhi and Bangalore, may at first glance look like ideal markets for the new houses, but the dislocation destroys businesses and communities.
A recent (PBS-affilliated POV) film, Good Fortune [pbs.org] , expands further on the damage that can be done via good intentions when it comes to rehousing folks.
... it wasn't something they would have wanted. I helped vaccinate kids, which was something they wanted, and everyone won.
Many economists, journalists, physicians, and so forth have written extensively about the aid industry, and the White/Educated/Western/Elite-knows-best mentality. I certainly am no exception — I moved to Ghana with notions of making solar lights in my spare time, so that persons without grid-access could see at night, only to come to understand that this was a product that most people in the place I was living would have little interest in. It didn't matter that I'd spent months figuring out how to cram solar panels and LEDs into wire-bale jars, media blast them with garnet to diffuse the light better, and so on
For some more literature on this sort of thing, I'd recommend William Easterly's