On
a recent visit to the Konkan Bamboo and
Cane Development Centre (KONBAC)
at Kudal, I came to know that there has been a drastic change in strategy to
promote bamboo as construction material. Rather than endorsing bamboo as an
affordable material for the poor, especially to build cost-effective houses, it
is now being popularised as a material that satisfies the upwardly mobile
elites’ fad of sustainability. Although the desire to replace unsustainable
materials is laudable, the question is whether these projects, using bamboo,
are truly as sustainable as they claim to be? Moreover, there also arises an
issue of appropriation of material culture, especially of the poor in tribal
areas by the dominant elites.
One
of the strongest criticisms of the appropriation of the architecture of the
poor has been made by the sociologist Anthony King, who writes that the rich
often appropriate the architecture of farmer’s cottages (farmhouses) for their
vacation homes (which are usually their second or third home). These elites,
King observes, only absorb the aesthetics of a farmer’s house and not their
lifestyle. The problem of the cultural appropriation of marginalized cultures without
assimilation of the marginalized population seems to be prevalent everywhere.
Raising the issues of cultural appropriation of hairstyles is a recent video titled Don’t Cash Crop on My Cornrows by Amandla
Stenberg. There are many similarities between hairstyle
and architecture. Both are about identity, and clearly about style. In so many
ways, hairstyles are, in fact, a form of architecture. Stenberg’s major criticism
is that white Americans love black culture more than they love the black
people.The video demonstrates how hip-hop and pop have been appropriated from African
American culture especially in terms of hairdos such as pleats, cornrows and so
forth, while continuing with the racist hatred towards black people. These
hairdos, as Stenberg notes, are ways in which black hair is kept from knotting.
Stenberg laments that while these hairdos are stereotypical of the community, when
white Americans adopts them, they turn into high fashion. This is a similar way
in which vernacular architecture gets appropriated when architect claim them as
‘contemporary-vernacular style’. While the rich appropriate the poor farmer’s
cottages to model their vacation-homes, these houses are always fitted with
appliances and systems (air-conditioning etc.) needed for the comfort of upmarket
modern living, which the vacationers cannot do without. Additionally there is
also a failure to acknowledge the role of vernacular people, the ones who have
championed the use of sustainable materials and forms in the first place.
In
his book, The System of Objects, Jean
Baudrillard argues that a suburbanite who aspires to move up into a higher
class usually does so by buying antiques – symbols of old social position
brought with new money. Essentially, he argues that the upwardly mobile class
signal their social standing through material signs such as antique furniture,
works of art, and so forth. Today, it is materials like bamboo that are being
pressed into the service of consumption, because they give the image of
sustainability. Using bamboo is fast becoming fashionable as appearing
sustainable can symbolize that one has truly arrived in the elite world. Bauldrillard
further discusses that every object has two functions – to be put to use and to
be possessed. While a plastic chair in a living room can be put to use, it
never seem to be dearly possessed, whereas the antique voltaire, may at times not even be used but is dearly possessed as
an object. The argument for the bamboo is similar. The rich use it in an
attempt to possess it as an object rather than utilising it functionally. It
seems that the dominant cultures intermittently stoop to peripheral ones in
order to appropriate from them, without the guilt of further marginalizing
them. The violence is doubled as the poor are made to believe that there is
legitimacy in the marginalized culture only when there is a sanction of it by
the dominant ones.
The
use of bamboo as ‘sustainable’ material in the construction of elite houses is
also problematic because of the cost and distance of procuring it, as it is
usually not locally available. Holistic sustainability has to factor in the
ecological implication of transporting materials, plus the carbon footprint of
the air-travel that the ‘designer’ architect would spend on travelling to the
site. Moreover, even if sustainable material is used for the building of a second
or third home, then the very idea of sustainability is defeated because
sustainability has to be about satisfying only the primary needs of living and
not about luxury.
It
is not that architects and clients should completely ignore bamboo as a
sustainable building material. In fact, organization like KONBAC have resorted
to the marketing of bamboo to elites because there is no culture of building in
bamboo in our society. Today, bamboo should not be a material of choice but
that of convenience and compulsion. What is then required is a system of making
bamboo easily available by creating a network of bamboo farmers, as KONBAC
claims to have done. It is also important that the government create bamboo
forests in close proximity to urban areas so that its transport from the source
to the site is sustainable. Building in bamboo should not be about style but
that of real ecological and social responsibility.
