Performance Pods - a shell spatial housing system

Abstract

The world population is expanding exponentially, UN [13]; it is currently estimated that over 3 billion people now live in urban contexts; and this number is expected to swell to almost 5 billion by the year 2030. Many of these new urbanites are poor and live in slum environments. Warfare, loss of tribal lands, and the search for a better life, often driven by technology, is shifting human-kind from low-density indigenous rural settings to highdensity urban centers where new urbanites are often economically deprived and lack the basic essentials of life; food, water, sanitation and habitation, Kusa [9]. Modern society, in an era of dwindling fossil-fuel energy, is experiencing unprecedented pressure to adapt cities for accommodation of the impoverished with affordable sustainable habitation, Reuters[11]. Our recent research is focused on improved habitation for urban slum dwellers; we realize the complexity of the necessary political, legal, financial and infrastructure improvements that will be necessary pre-requisites to the realization of major urban design habitat projects. Encouragingly, world-wide, many non-profit organizations are making efforts to assist with this monumental problem of human habitation, often through financial donations or volunteer materials and labor for housing. Our research hypothesis is that technology, the "thing" often attributed as the culprit that has caused of much of the poverty and human deprivation in the modern world, can be part of the answer to global housing. We feel technology should, and will, be a major contributor to future resolutions to human inequality and affordable sustainable habitation in the 21st century.