not just a house but a revolution

A frequently quoted statement by Albert Einstein establishes the foundation of all innovation that we are currently embroiled with. “"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."

A different approach is crucial to solve problems of the kind described by Christian Sarkar, that result through a multitude of factors including politics, lack of governance, macroeconomics and greed. Houses are made not for the betterment of people but for making money. And sustainable housing does not mean big money. The video is hosted at ftideacaravan and was presented at TEDxGateway Mumbai.  Franklin Templeton Investments partnered the TEDxGateway Mumbai in December 2012.

This implies that business houses have not been able to see the opportunity at the bottom of the pyramid (described in greater detail in C. K. Prahalad's book Fortune at the bottom of the pyramid). This is slowly changing with Indian corporate houses of the likes of Tata and Godrej foraying into affordable housing. This however is nowhere close towards making houses under 300 dollars.

The 300 dollar house problem defines innovation within constraints. These constraints defined the challenges to the concept and have been discussed in detail in Vijay Govindarajan's blog at HBR. The challenges were:

• Financial
• Design
• Co Creation
• Marketing
• Performance
• Corporate
• Sustainability
• Urban

 While I will not go into details of the blog post I strongly recommend readers to read it after watching the video to get a fuller grasp of what the 300 dollar problem is all about. The problem of affordable housing and enablement for the poor is of very high significance. In today's world housing should be a basic necessity, actually not a necessity, but a right.

The third component of Roti, Kapda and Makaan.

The greater significance is due to the impact of housing on the physical social and mental health of humans. The link between sanitation, cleanliness and living conditions is obvious. What is not clearly obvious is the impact on social and mental health. These impacts include aggresiveness, depression, anxiety, vandalism (Bonnefoy, X. (2007) ‘Inadequate housing and health: an overview’, Int. J. Environment and Pollution, Vol. 30, Nos. 3/4, pp.411–429 ).

The 300 dollar house becomes a major change agent in modifying communities. Changing lives not just of people but of societies. This project has a cascading effect on public health, crime, sustainable development, economic development, human welfare etc. The benefits are too numerous to enlist them. Some studies have shown that home ownership had a marginal impact on self esteem but a stronger impact on life satisfaction (The Effects of Homeownership: on the Self-Esteem, Perceived Control and Life Satisfaction of Low-Income People, Rohe and Stegman, Journal of the American Planning Association Volume 60, Issue 2, 1994).

 Happy human beings, healthy human beings, productive human beings, secure human beings. All for just 300 dollars.

Apart from this initiative, there are other projects that have similar goals. For example the Open Source Architecture network takes the community co-innovation approach for developing sustainable solutions. Another notable effort is that of Wikihouse, which is an open source construction set allowing people to design and build their own houses. Hassan Fathy's work in Egypt for example used mud bricks instead of conventional material. However the structures have not stood the test of time and the village of Old Gourna has been steadily replaced by buildings constructed from fired bricks.

This entire process of innovation is something that is described by the Economist as frugal innovation. This describes a process of setting a price target for innovation, a process adopted also by Tata Motors in the development of the Nano. That such an approach is the need for the day when it comes to housing is evident from the statistics defined in this article.  To quote verbatim "In 2010 the United Nations calculated that there were about 827m people living in slums—almost as many people as were living on the planet in Engels's time—and predicted that the number might double by 2030".

Together with microfinance organizations like Kiva, and Grameen Bank, the future of affordable housing is closer to reality than ever before. The application of the frugal innovation approach changes the level of innovation and its heartening to see that the community approach illustrates the success of using the open source model towards frugal innovation too.