What is Re-HOUSED?

An education and software solution to improve decision-making for flood and heat stress resilience in self-build housing.

Every year flooding and heat stress cause the deaths and displacements of thousands of households, negatively affect occupant’s health and thermal comfort, and worsen socioeconomic burdens of households in the tropical Global South. These losses and impacts are especially significant for vulnerable populations including the elderly, children, and people with disabilities.

Adapting to flooding and heat stress is paramount in reducing significant redevelopment costs and improving health, well-being, and safety of households. It is especially important, as a large part of the populace design and build their own housing in a widely practiced process called self-building. In cases where governments provide top-down and reactive approaches such as cooling centers and emergency communication, they are not always able to address the immediate and critical day-to-day needs of vulnerable populations.

Fortunately, through a systematic approach to literature review of over 1200 peer reviewed literature between 2000 and 2021, this research identified that households, specifically self-builders utilize certain bottom-up strategies including raising plinths and double-walling for flood and heat stress resilience in housing. However, research findings resulting from 800 surveys, interviews and focus groups revealed that conventional solutions are siloed and frequently fail due to improper application, as a result of self-builders’ knowledge gaps on conditions that impact viability of design solutions. Furthermore, while self-build design guides exist, their use is inhibited by language and the socioeconomic makeup of urban dwellers in these regions. There are over 5,000 languages spoken with multiple nomenclature in tropical global south, and although English is the official language of many of these countries, there is still a noteworthy percent of adult illiteracy.

Using coastal Nigeria as a case study, research was conducted to fill these gaps and promote resilience by developing a decision support toolkit which includes: 1) a consolidated resource of design solutions,

2) a web-app (algorithm) to diagnose vulnerabilities and contexts of decision makers, and predict viable and feasible design solutions amongst available options, and

3) a step-by-step guidebook to inform non-expert and low-technical self-build decision makers on how to design-build or make improvements to their housing to increase resilience against floods and heat stress.

This three-part decision support toolkit will help improve the adaptive capacity of people in some of the most vulnerable dwellings in the world.