Building community-driven vertical greening systems for people living on less than £1 a day: a case study in Nigeria

Akinwolemiwa, Oluwafeyikemi H., Bleil De Souza, Clarice ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7823-1202, De Luca, Luigi M. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2492-3075 and Gwilliam, Julie ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3256-7960 2018. Building community-driven vertical greening systems for people living on less than £1 a day: a case study in Nigeria. Building and Environment 131 , pp. 277-287. 10.1016/j.buildenv.2018.01.022

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Abstract

This paper reports and evaluates the process involved in designing and building affordable community-driven vertical greening systems (VGS) prototypes in a low-income neighbourhood of Lagos, Nigeria. Prototypes are intended to fulfil the dual function of improving indoor thermal comfort conditions and providing substrate to grow edible and medicinal plants. Besides that, the research aims to identify entrepreneurial competences and relationships in the community to transform the prototypes into commercially viable local products. ‘Qualitative fieldwork’ is used as a methodological approach and a product development roadmap is proposed that reports: design and construction development; performance evaluation of thermal impact and plant growth; costing; and community acceptability of the four different prototypes built in two different phases: rainy season 2014 and dry season 2016. The prototypes reduced internal air temperatures by an average of 2.3°C, moving internal comfort conditions to the comfort zone for around 90% to 100% of the time. Besides that, they provided around 16 crops of edible and medicinal plants per year. For two variants of prototypes (bamboo and prefabricated timber), the study reports a range of revenues from the sales of crops, and the estimated payback period (PBP) and internal rate of return (IRR) of the investment.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Business (Including Economics) Architecture
Subjects:	T Technology > TA Engineering (General). Civil engineering (General) T Technology > TH Building construction
Additional Information:	This paper is published under the terms of the CC-BY licence
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	0360-1323
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	16 March 2018
Date of Acceptance:	11 January 2018
Last Modified:	12 Nov 2024 10:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/108157

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