In a world with a population of over 7 billion people, it is not really a surprise that their are housing crises in nearly every major city across the planet. In countries like Australia, Canada, and the UK, this problem manifests in essentially unaffordable housing that has many people trapped in an endless cycle of renting spaces. This is frustrating for a lot of people and has inspired a social movement that seeks out alternatives to leasing such as building homes with shipping container leasing or constructing other variations of tiny homes. In first-world nations, there is the luxury for individuals pursuing these alternatives as a solution to their own problems. However, this is not as simple in developing nations.
In developing countries, the problem is a little different. While there is still the challenge of affordable housing, the problem manifests in extremely dense populations of people living in slums or slum-like conditions. The average household size is much larger and the living space is drastically smaller. This means that people are cramming themselves into tight communities in order to have the opportunity to live in the city. Urbanization is a reality of the changing global community, but this doesn’t meant that solutions cannot be devised. It is much more difficult for people who are living far below the poverty line to come up with their own alternative solutions that would constitute a decent standard of living, so many of them remained trapped without the social mobility to escape.
Solutions To Global Challenges
An example of the difficulty of living in hyper-dense urban areas is the Dharavi Slum in Mumbai, India. This is one of the most densely populated places on earth and the people that live here face a plethora of challenges as a result. Adequate facilities and infrastructure such as plumbing and electrical systems are either severely overburdened or non-existent. This makes living in these communities extremely difficult and can have a severe impact on the quality of life for the people who do.
An example of the difficulty of living in hyper-dense urban areas is the Dharavi Slum in Mumbai, India. This is one of the most densely populated places on earth and the people that live here face a plethora of challenges as a result. Adequate facilities and infrastructure such as plumbing and electrical systems are either severely overburdened or non-existent. This makes living in these communities extremely difficult and can have a severe impact on the quality of life for the people who do.
However, there are efforts to address this problem, and one such example is a contest that was held called Superskyscrapers’ Competition: Steel City – Container Skycraper. This competition asked participants to design buildings that used shipping containers as part of the principal design concept in order to address the living conditions of the densely populated Dharavi Slum.
The results of the competition demonstrated how innovative solutions can be developed by using resources and construction methods that were both unexpected and creative. Many of the entries leveraged the potential of using a recycled material like a shipping container with sustainable practices in order to design a project that could address multiple social issues at once.