The visit to the Building and Road Research Institute (see Figure 4.24), namely the BRRI20, in Fumesua near Kumasi, was mainly to talk to the experts at their Materials Division and find out about the production of pozzolana, which I had been reading about prior to my travel. The BRRI expertise includes research on and the manufacture of pozzolana amongst a variety of building materials (the BRRI started research on pozzolana in 1973). The experts at BRRI conduct research into all aspects of building,
20The BRRI is one of the 13 research Institutes of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) , Ghana. It was established in 1952 as the West African Building Research Institute in Accra. With the attainment of political independence, (Nigeria in 1960 left), the Institute became known as Building Research Institute of the Ghana Academy of Sciences. In 1963 when the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi faced acute shortage of lecturers in architectural, engineering, planning, quantity surveying, etc., the then government of Ghana relocated the Institute to the KNUST campus. In 1964 the Institute's mandate was expanded to include road research duties and hence its new name, The Building and Road Research Institute (BRRI) (http://www.brri.org/index.php/about-us)
Figure 4.23 The
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The Building and Road Recearch Institute (BRRI) campus in Fumesua, Kumasi.
training and technology transfer in the construction and transportation sectors as well as development of construction materials from local sources.
Dr Annan, originally a biologist and at the time of my fieldwork the Head of Commercialization and Information department at the BRRI, introduced us to a research architect in the Construction division and a materials scientist in the Building Materials division, Michael and Thomas, respectively. Both the Building Materials division and the Construction division were relevant to our work in Abetenim. During the meeting Michael was concerned that one of our group members was ‘speeding against time’. Our colleague’s obsession with finishing on time, deadlines and ‘pushing them to work fast’ in his own words, put us in a difficult situation especially because the rest of us disagreed with him. Michael advised us to have caution as visualisation may be deceptive, and added that, ‘you must slow down, time should not be pushing you; it is better to create something good and permanent instead of pushing something to be built’. He also expressed his worry about our lack of understanding of the concept
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‘time’ or priorities in Ghana. At BRRI we discussed the use of local materials for building and found out that building with earth is not allowed in urban areas. ‘Local materials are thought of as substandard unless the municipality approved of them,’ explained the BRRI staff. The mindset of the local politicians was that earth bricks and clay were not sufficient for today’s construction. Dr Annan brought up the issue of the association with poverty, memory and time, and stated that:
“Traditionally all the politicians, the local government and decisions makers come from rural areas, villages or hamlets which are often poverty- struck, and have eventually moved up in life and into the big cities like Accra and Kumasi. So they associate clay, earth, adobe and other local and natural materials with poverty and this is why they do not approve of their usage in construction especially within the urban fabric. No-one wants to live in poverty. Cement, concrete and other materials which are associated with wealth, modernity and good quality are encouraged and supported. The association with poverty is the problem. No-one also wants to be reminded of poverty or having been poor.”
The BRRI staff suggested that there was a twist in the building law in Ghana which would allow one to apply for permission in order to build with earth/atakpame. The application would be declined unless the applicant paid a ‘fee’ suggested by the officials.21 It was also pointed out that the way architecture is taught in Ghana encourages the use of concrete and discourages that of clay. ‘Their minds have been concretised’, they said referring to the architecture students and added that ‘it would be a fantastic idea to involve them in the school canteen project but we would have to go through the head of the Architecture Department, nothing happens unless he agrees even if everyone else supports the idea.’22 They once again tried to explain that we need to stop rushing and instead spend time to research and test soils before we start construction on site. They were concerned to hear that only after a week of being in Abetenim the facilitator and leader of our group wanted to push for starting construction
21 In Chapter 2 (Literature Review) I already discuss the use of local and natural materials, however, I intend to elaborate even further on this issue as it is emerging as one of the core themes from my fieldwork, mainly through the work of Schildermann (2004).
22 Again, the notion of informality or the ‘deconcretisation of the minds’ is another emerging theme from my fieldwork and will be eventually developed further. This notion of informality was also discussed in depth during the 2014 conference of the Development Planning Unit, Bartlett School of Architecture (DPU) marking their 60th anniversary. This will be taken into account when I theorise this notion.
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on site. The rest of us agreed with Michael, who advised us to stop rushing and instead spend time to research and test soils before we start construction on site.
The process of ‘unlearning’ was necessary as we were completely new to Ghana and Abetenim, poverty and generally earth building. Advocating the use of earth in construction and unapologetically against the use of concrete seemed rather pretentious especially because we all came from more ‘modern’ and economically developed parts of the world, where concrete would be the most widely used building material. We were either too young or perhaps too ignorant to remember that our ancestors’ dwellings had most probably been made from earth before they got the opportunity to move out of poverty and into modern houses. None of us had any idea what it would be like to live in an earth building. From speaking with the locals in Abetenim, and from spending time in the field, one immediately realises that they aspire to be modern and to be able one day to build their modern and more ‘permanent’ houses from cast concrete blocks. Hence, they save money and gradually invest in concrete blocks, which they usually store next to their dwellings, until they acquire enough quantity to be able to build their new modern houses. In the meantime their existing mud or Atakpame houses slowly fall into ruins as the locals’ priorities lie elsewhere and not in their maintenance. The latter entails the re-plastering and repairing of existing earth buildings and requires skilled labour, which is costly in this context. This is also evident in other rural areas in Ghana. Thus, modernity, which is debated at length in chapters 7 and 8, is a recurring theme that emerges from my fieldwork in Abetenim. What comes to light from conducting participant observation as part of the ethnographic approach in Abetenim, among other things, is the relationship between change and continuity and the need to reflect on this relationship; also, how the local people deal with change and modernity in relation to building materials, the deterioration of their earth dwellings, the influx of imported western materials, like cement, which are now considered to be local, and so on. ‘Our’ Western narratives of modernity and what being modern may mean in relation to building materials differ largely from the narratives of modernity in rural Ghana, and the South at large. We – Western architects, designers, researchers and so on involved in such work – tend to assume that modernity poses a threat to the local culture and building practices, but in fact local culture(s) and tradition(s) are not static entities; they are always in flux and predisposed to change. Thus, with regards to the paradigm of Ghana and the use of Pozzolana cement in making and stabilising compressed earth blocks, we need to reflect and research further as well as create awareness among the
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locals about the benefits of ‘modernising’ local traditional materials in coping with changing climatic, social and economic conditions. By ‘modernising’ here I refer to the approach of integrating the indigenous qualities and knowledge with those imported or adopted from the West, in order to create a modern identity of the place, which the locals aspire to, and in order to achieve long term benefits at a local level. We need to listen to the locals and by that I do not only refer to the local community at hand, but also to academia, practitioners, policy makers and so on in order to understand how we could proceed. In relation to the paradigm of Ghana again, the BRRI staff advised us that ‘in construction projects cement must be treated well; if you use too much it becomes your enemy.’ Thus, in order to contribute to longer-term sustainable adaptation in this context we need to look at the syncretism of the two, that is Western approaches to making and thinking about materials, and indigenous qualities and knowledge about materials, and how this syncretism may impact the local community socially, environmentally, economically and so on. And in order to make an impact and change people’s mindsets, one needs to persevere and set an example of integrating sustainable use of materials and resources consistently in our work. This was what both BRRI experts tried to alert us to, which unfortunately our facilitator was not perceptive of, insisting about ‘how important it is that he finishes on time.’ Yet despite our good intentions the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The latter is a quote from Jonathan M. Katz’s book titled, ‘The Big Truck That Went By’ (2013) which describes the bureaucracy, politics, and infighting between NGO’s involved in emergency response to disasters in Haiti post the 2010 earthquake. Echoing the words of one of the research participants, whom I interviewed in London before travelling to Ghana, she states:
“The Road to Hell is paved with good intentions’ is a quote from a book about disaster relief. You can mean all the best things in the world and still create terrible, terrible situations for people. So good intentions aren’t enough; you need knowledge and you need experience and you also need humility and communication skills. In fact communication is probably the most important skill to have. I think a lot of people are very ignorant about the culture of the community that they are going to visit, and very ignorant about themselves; they don’t have an awareness that they might be about to do something much worse than not doing anything at all.”
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The situation in Abetenim was almost a manifestation of the above: half-finished buildings scattered around both the Nka Foundation and the school sites, reminders of the short-sighted and prodigal use of limited resources by foreign architects/designers, or obronis23 as the locals would say, who intended to finish their buildings within the stipulated eight weeks from arriving in Ghana; reminders of money spent on projects which had not been completed. One of our colleagues seemed convinced that this was a sign of failure of the architects’ capacity. But was it? It could equally be a sign of an egocentric agenda that one would aim to complete their project within eight weeks regardless of the locals’ advice, as ‘otherwise it would look bad on them.’
It was a paradox that some of our group members used the word ‘I’ repeatedly in relation to all the decisions and work done by the group, separating themselves from the rest of us. We were in Abetenim working with a small self-sufficient community which showed a shared collective responsibility for everyone’s welfare. Cooperative building work and collective effort, caring for the latter seemed to be the most significant thing there, not of the individual so much. This was illustrated in the idea of bartering of materials’ delivery onsite and building chores for providing a canteen building to the children as this was a community project. Paul would ask taxi drivers whose children studied at his school to deliver cement bags to the site gratis as it would be their children who would benefit from the project. He explained that, ‘to deliver a bag of cement from either Kumasi or Effiduase to Abetenim would cost 1,5GHC per bag so to deliver ten bags of cement would cost 15GHC’.
This ethos reflected in the building process too and it was what differentiated ‘us’ from ‘them’, in other words what we ‘lacked.’ Our cultures celebrated individualism whereas their culture the collective. Robert Venturi in ‘Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture’ (1966) wrote that, ‘architecture has a special obligation toward the whole; its truth must be in its totality or its implications of totality. It must embody the difficult unity of inclusion rather than the easy unity of exclusion.’ Our group seemed to lack that obligation towards the whole.
There would not be much space for the word ‘I’ in the everyday lexicon and interactions within the Abetenim community. Instead there would be mutual trust and dependence
23
Obroni or Oburoni is the Twi language word for ‘white person’. Its literal meaning is ‘a person from beyond the horizon’, a foreigner. The word ‘oburoni’ derives from the word ‘buro’ which means ‘from beyond the horizon’ and ‘ni’ which means ‘person’.
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on the other. No-one goes hungry in the village because there is enough food for everyone. The lady cook is able to cook for the schoolchildren every day because they bring with them wood to burn for her stove. The wood is offered by their mothers so their children can have lunch at school. There is mutual trust that the mothers will send wood for her every day and that she will cook for the children in return. With her while cooking, she had not only her own baby but also the two year old girl of her friend who was unable to provide food for her during the time of my fieldwork. Hence the lady cook takes her along to school and makes sure she is fed.