Self Help Housing as a Sustainable Community Approach in Malaysia

Dr. Wan Srihani Wan Mohamed

Communities face enormous challenges as their social, economic, and environmental resources are depleted and destroyed. Sustainable development represents a holistic way to achieve recovery and enhanced the quality of life for everyone in these communities by developing local assets to revitalize economies, limiting waste and pollution, improving the status of disadvantaged people, conserving natural resources, and promoting cooperation and efficiency. By employing self help approach to build houses, it facilitates the planning and actions by these stakeholders and become effective agents to achieve sustainability. This article demonstrated simple approaches of utilising local materials for self help housing that was able to house many poor people as well as developed further the meaning of community involvement in the context of developing countries. Although some materials are available in the market and some are produced locally and specifically for certain housing projects, there are evidence that what is categorised as affordable construction materials may not be a simple straightforward construction. Hence, the need for government involvement in terms of providing sufficient workshops or road shows about self help housing would encourage the current generation in rural area of Malaysia to consider the alternative approach of homeownership.

Like most other developing countries, Malaysia is also facing problems of providing adequate shelter for a large portion of its people, especially the poor. Malaysia Government has extensively planned in building houses through public and private sector. Hundreds of thousands of houses have been formally constructed through both these sectors. Yet the more and faster the houses are built, there are always more people requiring new houses year after year, making the formal sector incapable of satisfying the targeted needs. Many organisations, government or private, had indeed investigated various aspects of reducing the cost of building these houses. It either involved experimental houses built by new cheaper materials or redesigning the spatial arrangement of the existing tight spaces or involving high technology panels to be produced in mass amount or rezoning the low-cost housing area outside city centre where price of land is cheaper. It is a known fact that the need for low-cost housing is irrefutable but the question of what is the best approach sustainable enough for these houses to be built is an imperative debate since societies have diverse requirements for themselves. The understanding of the term sustainability itself has led to too many tenets ranging from production of sustainable materials, conserving energy, employing sustainable technology, listing factors that contribute to sustainable development etc. So how does one perceive sustainable?

What is sustainability?

Generally, however, there is a commonly understood idea of sustainability – that is, the capacity for continuance into the long term. The most popular recent definition of sustainability can be traced to a 1987 United Nations Conference and states that sustainability in the context of development is: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (Brundtland, 1987).  How do we perceive sustainability in a community? Sustainable development represents a holistic way to achieve recovery and enhance the quality of life for everyone in any communities by developing local assets to revitalise economies, limiting waste and pollution, improving the status of disadvantaged people, conserving natural resources, and promoting cooperation and efficiency (Serageldin, 1997).  Harris and Borer (2005) agreed that sustainable development need to address social and economic as environmental considerations. Therefore it is right to make the links between housing and community; people and jobs; comfort and deprivation, whereby the complex interface between the physical fabric of a building and its impact on the people.

The sustainability of self help housing

Like so many other architects, engineers, authorities etc are more concerned with the problems of underdevelopment hence the dependency on innovative solutions of high technology. A search for an appropriate technology in self help housing does not require such solutions to emulate the efficient systems of machine age. It is therefore imperative to realise housing should be based on technologies that are suitable to our climate and social context. Much research concentrated on developing technologies, materials, development that are sustainable in many aspects. We recognise the value of sustainability mostly through tangible evidence that can be measured by certain method. Alexander (1985) developed six principles for a community to be applied as they build their own houses using locally available materials in Northern Mexico. Poh (2009) described how Zaldivar was inspired by mixing recyclable plastics with loofah turning them into panels for self help housing in Paraguay.

Self help houses as stated in many literature reviews have shown positive results that is too significant to evade in providing housing for the poor. Yusoff (1993) concluded through several references that direct involvement by government on housing matters should be avoided and as an alternative, government should act as catalyst of inputs and provider of infrastructure rather than as a manufacturer of finished units.

By far, the role of modern technologies is always secondary to be considered in self help housing process, limiting this approach to accept the conventional construction when supply houses for the poor. On the contrary, when appropriate technologies are managed by the local communities, it added self-control in their participation of housing construction. What needed to be gauged is to find a technology that is cost effective, suitable for the local community either socially or culturally and can be encouraged technically to be appropriately used in the development of self help housing. Therefore, role players either in public or private sectors would need to deal with the distribution of such knowledge informing such alternative to own a house is possible to do in an organised approach. Besides the technicality of the procurement of self help housing, the micro-credit should also be established alongside with the alternative method.

                                                        Unlimited ideas of self help housing designs (source: internet)

                                         Unlimited ideas of self help housing designs (source: internet)

                                                         Unlimited ideas of self help housing designs (source: internet)

Date of Input: 21/10/2024 | Updated: 21/10/2024 | marini