INDUSTRIAL ECOLOGY TOWARDACOMPREHENSIVE SOLUTIONSETFORAHEALTHYENVIRONMENT ANDECONOMY In the spring of 2006 a group of 25 Urban Planning graduate students and faculty from the University of California, Los Angeles visited the AKTC and were given a presentation by Seif Rashidi on the initiatives undertaken in the area. The group was deeply impressed, and one of the UCLA Ph.D. candidates, Taha Rassam Culhane, on fellowship at AUC, decided to focus his thesis on the issue of household hot waterservice and demand in Darb El Ahmar. When preliminary research began to indicate that as much as 25% of the community had no formal water heaters (now confirmed by a survey of 230 households conducted by the AKTC survey team under Haitham Khalifa and Ahmed Essam) and that those who did have water heaters were often reluctant to use them or repair them and were returning to dangerous and inconvenient stove top heating because of the rising costs of gas and electricity, Taha began to look for ways to bring sustainable renewable energy to the area through local capacity building. Picture shows the AKTC project area in Google Earth with 230 household heaters plotted on the buildings. Red = electric appliance, Gre en = Gas appliance, Dark Blue = B utagas stove, Yellow = Babur. Architects Kareem Ibrahim and Naveen George gave Taha and AKTC carpentry trainer Mustafa Hussein, who is a local resident, an opportunity to experiment with the possibility of building solar hot water systems out of local and recycled materials using local expertise. 1
Picture is of 23 year old Mustafa Hussein and his hand-made solar hot water systems, one on hisfamily's centuries old roof next to the wall being restored by the Aga Khan foundation at the base of AlAzhar park the other across from the Darb Shuglan complex. Both were placed to be visible by visitorsto the park to increase environmental awareness.
With collaboration and support of graduates from the AKTC plumbing trainee program such as Mohamed Diab, Taha and Mustafa constructed the first three of many functional low cost systems on the roofs of three buildings visible from AlAzhar park. One was placed on Mustafa's home by the Aslan gate, and two onrenovated buildings -- 72 Darb Al Shuglan, across from the Darb Shuglan complex,and 4 Abu Huryeba, near the Aslan square renovation area.
A recent US AID small infrastructure grant of $25,000 awarded to the local group,which calls itself "Solar C3ITIES" (Connecting Community Catalysts IntegratingTechnologies for Industrial Ecology Systems) , is now enabling members of the Darb
El Ahmar environmental NGO and members of the nearby Zabaleen NGO Roh ElShabab to work together to build dozens of systems in both communities, sharingexperience materials and expertise.
Plastic and recycled materials: local innovations bring down cost
Because the Solar CITIES industrial ecology project is a local initiative, involvingcraftspeople from the community, and not an exogenous project (Taha and his wifeDr. Sybille Culhane, though foreigners, now live in one of the renovated buildings),there is a keen sense of participatory development innovation and cost consciousnessthat makes the effort more likely to endure. The key to bringing cost down turned out
to be local experimentation in the use of indigenous plastic parts, most of themrecycled from the Zabaleen community. Many of the boxes housing the solar heatabsorbers are made from pressed recycled plastic bags, the plumbing uses recycled
polypropylene pipes, and recycled plastic shampoo barrels are used as pressureregulating cold and hot water storage tanks. These tanks are fitted with plastic FloatValves (Owamas) and durable plastic fittings supplied by Egyptian inventor MagdyZahran.
(Picture: Local inventor Magdy Zahran, reknowned for his water conservation technologies, regularlyvisits the Solar C3ITIES project to lend a helping hand and new ideas, an example of how AKTCinitiatives inspire widespread participation.)
Local initiatives inspire widespread participation
In addition to the contributions of Magdy Zahran and other engineers from Egypt andabroad, local renewable energy systems businessman and engineer Alaa Watidy fromRSD technologies in Madinat Nasr generously supplied the Solar C3ITIES project astate of the art German-designed/Chinese-manufactured vacuum tube solar collector so local plumbers and residents could try out and learn about the latest technology.
Picture: Local master plumber Mohamed Diab and Engineer Alaa Watidy install professional vacuumtube solar collector on building 72; Solar C3ITIES coordinator Mahmoud Dardir, a Darb El Ahmar native, joins the home-made and professional systems together.
With affordable solar hot water systems providing both cold water and hot water rooftop storage for 24 hour availability in an area where water service is frequentlycut, new possibilities for integrated technology/environment/economic solutions
become conceivable and the solution space is widened.
In February of 2008 at a meeting of the local environmental NGOs and communitymembers at the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Darb El Ahmar, a discussion centeredon why the rooftop gardening projects were experiencing sustainability challengesand how integrated industrial ecology solutions – merging the domestic hot and coldwater project and the urban agriculture project -- could help bring sustainability to theenvironmental initiatives. During two hours of very fruitful discussion, thecommunity applied the heuristic "don't dwell on the multiple factors that led tofailure, and what doesn't work; figure out instead how rooftop gardens can integratewith the real and perceived needs of the stakeholders, and how they might satisfymultiple needs if integrated with a larger ecological system, such as solar hot water systems". This is the "ecological rationality" approach championed by the ABC
Research Group -- "rationality that is defined by its fit with reality".
(Photo: Samiya and Sou'ad, members of the Darb Shuglan/Darb El Ahmar local environmentalcommittee, Samiya's children and Solar CITIES coordinator Mahmoud Dardir observe the integratedsolar hot water/rooftop gardening system -- a combined initiative between Solar CITIES and the AKTCenvironmental NGO that provides rooftop stored hot and cold water for domestic household use andurban agriculture at the same time.)
The discussion among local stakeholders revealed that most people cannot investtime or resources heavily in "pie in the sky ideas" that, however well intentioned,don't fit into the daily struggle to make ends meet in a community that must live withuncertainty every day. New or unfamiliar technologies must be streamlined andintegrated into the daily practices of the stakeholders and meet several needssimultaneously without adding incommensurate extra burdens.
What was concluded in the multi-stake-holder environmental meeting was that if wewere to COMBINE roof top gardening with roof top water storage and "simultaneous-solar-heating-and-sun-shelter" installations (provides cold and hot water all year round; keeps the roof cooler in the summer) and see it all as part of a gradual move
toward energy/food/economic independence (combined possibly with roof top biogas production following the Indian ARTI model for utilizing and creating compost with
urban waste , with ground-source heat pump and small scale wind energy and photovoltaic technologies for disaster preparedness and insurance against risingenergy and food costs), we could generate more ideas and greater acceptance andstakeholder commitment.
Thus the Solar C3ITIES project at the AKTC is not intended specifically to introducerooftop gardens or solar energy per se. Instead, the project strives to help acommunity get on its feet and get sustainable "by all means necessary". Right now, according to the preliminary survey results on hot water demand, becauseof what are still relatively high investment costs, very few people living in urban
poverty in Cairo are going to demand "solar hot water" systems per se (the high priceof copper makes a family size system still cost nearly LE2500). People in thecommunity are adept at heating their water using the stove when necessary and haveadjusted to the inconvenience and are unwilling to pay more than they are paying now(their own labor is in greater supply than their income, and is discounted on a daily
level). While they almost all recognize the long term advantages of SHW, even withthe cost lowering innovations pioneered in the project area, most people cannot justifythe expense given that gas and electricity are still heavily subsidized in Cairo. So anattempt to introduce unsubsidized solar energy to the slums WILL fail if that is whatwe say we want to deliver.
But if we are delivering a concept of integrated industrial ecology -- if we areintroducing flexible, modular, changeable solution sets to a multiplicity of localconcerns -- then we can build confidence in and familiarity with each new innovativeidea, and impart this heuristic -- already available at the local level -- to the task of conceiving environmental technology endeavors that can benefit everyone in both thelocal and the global environment.
Pictures: Using models of the action area created by Nivine Akl, Mohamed Ebaid, Heba Foda, KareemIbrahim, Mahmoud Qotb, Mohamed Said, Nadine Samir, Roberto Simeone, and Ibrahim Zakareya,Taha Rassam Culhane mocks up the solar roofs project in Google Earth to share the vision with theworld community in 3D.
![An Ecology for Cities: A Transformational Nexus of Design ... › nrs › pubs › jrnl › 2015 › nrs_2015_childers_001… · of cities [19,20] to an ecology for cities based on](https://static.documents.pub/doc/80x56/5f0d84417e708231d43abf9a/an-ecology-for-cities-a-transformational-nexus-of-design-a-nrs-a-pubs-a.jpg)
