Sustainable homes: Alternative building technologies for low-carbon affordable housing construction

Many people live in unsafe informal structures which disproportionately expose them to climate change impacts, while the construction sector is among the largest emitters of greenhouse gases. This paper looks at how alternative building technologies (ABTs) can be a game changer (PDF, 3.9MB) for affordable housing that is safe, dignified, climate-resilient and potentially low-carbon, and their great potential for job creation.

Drawing on extensive interviews, case study analysis and literature review, this paper explains what ABTs are and highlights their benefits over conventional building materials or methods. It proposes a set of criteria to assess the potential of ABTs in contributing to the intersecting affordable housing – climate – economy nexus of imperatives. It then addresses how ABTs have been adopted in South Africa and details case studies where ABTs have been used in affordable housing construction. The paper analyses these case studies against the proposed criteria and distils lessons from this analysis. It identifies barriers to the broader uptake of ABTs, particularly for affordable housing and self-build construction, and concludes with proposed strategies to scale up their use in this regard. This paper is targeted at officials in all three spheres of government, as well as the private sector, civil society and academia, as each has a role to play in creating promoting and enabling the use of ABTs in affordable housing construction.