Thousands of bamboo and adobe shelters are providing relief in flood‑prone regions of Pakistan, yet government bodies remain sceptical of the materials
When record‑breaking monsoon rains hit Pakistan in June last year, following an unusually severe heatwave, they led to one of the deadliest and costliest flooding disasters on the Indian subcontinent. By October, the floods had displaced some 33 million people, with Sindh province in the south‑east of the country particularly badly affected. With rural and largely underserved communities reliant on mango orchard management, livestock rearing and farming, this region saw 1,540,000 acres of farmland swept away by the floods, and almost eight hundred deaths.
Among the humanitarian responses to the disaster was a joint initiative from the Pakistani chapter of the International Network for Traditional Building, Architecture and Urbanism (INTBAU) and the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, an NGO set up and led by architect Yasmeen Lari. Starting in September 2022, 1,000 prefabricated emergency shelters were constructed in the villages of Mirpurkhas, Naushahro Feroze, Shikarpur, Khairpur, Kot Diji, Keti Bandar, Jamshoro, Mehrabpur, and Jacobabad in Sindh, and Lasbela village in neighbouring Balochistan province. These were based on a design by Lari for an eight‑walled 12-foot diameter bamboo and date palm structure, originally conceived as a response to the devastating Hindu Kush earthquake in 2015: the Lari Octa Green (LOG) shelter. Initially serving as emergency shelters, some have since incorporated adobe wall insulation and are now part of the reconstruction efforts as a permanent housing solution for communities in Sindh with limited means.
Each LOG structure sleeps five people on the floor and two charpoys (string beds) and can join up with other octagonal huts to expand living space. Their foundations comprise lime brick, lime and concrete, while the roofs are constructed upon a bamboo frame with thatch and reed as layering materials on top. The frames were prefabricated using materials from the village of Pono and the town of Makli, both in Sindh. Wall panels and doors are made from bamboo frames upon which mud plaster can be applied. ‘All our work is entirely zero-carbon,’ says Lari, ‘and because of its low cost and participatory low-tech approach, this happens to be the only methodology that has been scaled up to thousands’.
The structure serves the local lifestyle well: in Sindh villages, substantial time is spent outdoors, with women typically cooking and managing livestock in the spaces adjacent to houses, and meeting to chat during the day with the house as a backdrop. The design of the LOG shelters helps carry out this vital function with a slightly raised plinth – the heights of these plinths is maintained at six inches above the lastest flood level – enabling women and children to use these multifunctional spaces in a meaningful way.
While allowing for ornamentation and adjustment, Lari’s design follows a standardised construction process that taps into local knowledge and building techniques. In Sindh, like elsewhere in Pakistan, many traditional structures are made with adobe and stabilised with additives such as thatch, cow dung and lime; houses, granaries, barns, communal sitting spaces, mosques and temples have been built this way since people first settled here. Over time, these structures have been cared for, replastered and repaired, and have lasted for centuries. Local knowledge is plentiful, both for self‑builds and for following prescribed design formats such as Lari’s, and the LOG scheme has benefited greatly from this, with local people learning to work with the materials quickly. To aid local communities in constructing the shelters, the designs and building instructions have been made available on the Heritage Foundation’s website in the form of YouTube tutorial videos.
‘Local knowledge is plentiful, both for self‑builds and for following prescribed design formats such as LOG’
The availability of LOG’s principal building materials is key in making the prototype replicable at scale. Good quality clay and soil is widely available across Sindh and many other parts of the country. While bamboo has not been a primary building material historically, bamboo cultivation has been picking up in Pakistan in recent decades, with acreage having more than doubled from 9,000 hectares in 1992 to 20,000 in 2010, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation. If carefully chosen species of the plant are cultivated with technical guidance, adobe and bamboo construction has the potential to trigger rural sector reforms in Sindh and elsewhere in Pakistan – but it will need support from local government and policy makers.
At present, government agencies, construction consultants and administrators tend to value conventional concrete construction, finding little to celebrate in the modest and pro‑nature adobe structures of Pakistan’s rural regions. There is a widely held belief that adobe and bamboo construction is inadequate to deal with flooding disasters and torrential rains. The Sindh People’s Housing Foundation (SPHF), a provincial government outfit with a mandate to initiate and supervise redevelopment of housing hit by rain and flood disasters, argues that flood and rains destroy mud houses to a great extent, and that reconstruction should be done using more ‘durable’ options such as concrete, steel and bricks. However, the Pakistan branch of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), which first helped Lari develop the LOG prototype in 2015, has argued that the ‘octagonal form is inherently strong and, unlike concrete, the light bamboo frames pose no danger to life’. Lari herself has noted that many bamboo and adobe structures built prior to the most recent flooding catastrophe, ‘have survived through 2022 in the worst-affected area of Kot Diji, Upper Sindh.’ While the SPHF is aware of LOG structures in Sindh, it is not currently looking to adopt them as a more permanent, scaled‑up housing option for the province. The question remains how to make LOG and similar ventures replicable and adaptable options for large-scale rehabilitation and redevelopment efforts.
‘Despite the lack of local political support, there have already been many plant‑based building initiatives across Sindh’
Despite the lack of local political support, there have already been many plant‑based building initiatives across Sindh, alongside the LOG scheme. The Urban Resource Centre (URC), for example, an NGO based in Karachi, has supported house construction in rural Sindh and Balochistan for many years, before and during the past years’ ravaging by floods and torrential rain. A total of 137 villages have been served with more than 1,996 houses constructed. The URC works with local community‑based organisations to assist in building with mud, thatch, cow dung, steel girders and straw. Notably, these efforts have seen the participation of village women in the construction workforce. Similarly, the Indus Earth Trust (IET), another NGO based in Karachi, has done useful work in promoting design and construction using local organic materials: in addition to adobe, thatch and bamboo, it has developed compressed earth blocks for use in Sindh and elsewhere. These examples demonstrate the considerable potential of bio‑based materials in design and construction in Pakistan.
In recent years, international architects working on the Indian subcontinent have also helped promote the suitability of adobe and plant‑based construction in the region. Laurie Baker, for instance, worked on affordable housing for rural populations in the foothills of the Himalayas and terrains of Kerala, producing handwritten manuals for training construction workers and local laypeople. Baker left a valuable legacy of ideas, design solutions and theoretical approaches that continue to invite fresh appraisal. More recently, Anna Heringer and her team helped evolve elegant low‑cost housing solutions with their projects in Rudrapur in Bangladesh. These projects, alongside Lari’s LOG scheme in Sindh, should be more widely documented, analysed and communicated, so that the country’s decision‑making elite appreciate their significance.
