Uploaded on 2015-04-29 by SamuelHWUK

Neighborhood Zango/Viana, city Luanda, country Angola. What you see a modest 2 bedroom dwelling made for lower middle class family, it is constructed as part of a private project where small houses and land ploy are sold to people at 20.000$, which is relatively cheap. The house itself is build with Cement that is probably partially imported from China to make the Cement blocks and concrete, as local production cannot cover all the market needs, steel imported from abroad also as Angola has close to zero local production. All these materials are imported and are likely bough indirectly due to money generated by oil revenue, either through salaries filtering the money in the local economy or Government guaranteed loans provided to local business people. In either case such oil stimulated economic activity is greatly affected by oil prices fluctuation, as oil account for half the GDP and 70% of government revenue. While the materials are imported, the know-how to build the house is local, but this provides two problems: 1- The house is not built within the standards of Western Construction manuals, not only is construction material is overused in some areas, such as loadbearing columns that have more capacity than the load they experience requires, but even underused also when the foundation of house is too thin to prevent cracking that will occurs as the land plot passes through dry/wet cycles partially due to climate but also due to increase in soil water content from leaking water storage silos and septic tanks. Another lacking aspect is the complete lack of any semblance of comprehensive sanitation system, the house is offered with no sewer connection or septic tank, leaving it to each owner the task of building his septic tank without any preset standard, leading to the risk of overloading the soil with untreated waste water, which is significant because the same owner will also have to build water storage tanks underground, again without suitable standards, leading both to the risk of leakage and the risk of contamination. Another Western know-how not applied is weather water disposal, as the plot is provided with no surface water manage flowpaths, thus leading to a future problem of muddy roads and unstable terrain due to the clay soil. 2- Despite being local, the knowledge doesn't take into account any local lessons learned. For example in a city with poor surface water drainage, the house is low it would be flooded at the first intense rain. Despite local heat, the house has no suitable passive air-flow cooling features. Despite rainy season flooding, no effort was made to even aptempt to provide surface water management. While the houses are for low to medium income middle class people, lets keep in mind that people who do buy these houses have at least high school done, have access to internet, satellite TV and have traveled a few times in their lives, but still they cannot aggregate the information they receive to meaningfully inpact their lives positively. So in short, altough they are part of the global culture, they fail to integrate elements of it in their lives, combine it with local knowlegde and make their globally enabled houses more suitable for living. To make this house more beautiful it is usual for owners to subcontract Chinese workers to do finishing touches but without addressing any of the underlying infrastructure issues. So while part of a globalized world as per the construction material, it is isolated both of the globalized world knowledge database in terms of construction technique and infrastructure, but also from its own local reality. Part of the problem is a lack of overaching plan or standards set by the an authority, which coupled with people lack of organized building tradition, leads to even people of middle to well off class to build or buy such substandard housing. It is possible that with proper standard and information, the same ressource could have been used to build a more liveable house. [A Modest House for middle class][2] [1]: http://i601.photobucket.com/albums/tt91/pamba/IMG_20141207_1531401.jpg [2]: http://