Anam New City Project, Nigeria

Quardean Lewis-Allen (MArch ’13) received the Community Service Fellowship Program—International Travel Award to fund his travel to Nigeria. Working with the Dr. Aloy & Gesare Chife Foundation, a registered non-profit organization in Nigeria focused on improving the study, teaching and application of technology in Africa, he participated in a workshop for the Anam New City project. The project is a collective effort of the greater Anam community in partnership with the Chife Foundation whose overall goal is to create a dynamic model for sustainable development that balances ecology with economic growth, delivers world-class quality of life across generations and leverages technology within the African culture of collective progress.

Quardean’s work this summer included a neighborhood survey of existing Anam housing settlements, the development of affordable housing for a new greenfield rurban (hybrid urban + rural landscape) development and the strategies of implementation of the housing at multiple scales. This encompasses roof construction detailing to housing aggregation at the community scale, creating the phase one development plan for housing on the Ogwuyo site.

All houses will be off-the-grid, built from local and renewable materials, with the objective of being customized to fit the cultural frame of the modernizing Igbo society while being simultaneously viable under the constraints of social microfinance. Pictured is the morphological array of housing typologies that refined the logic of standardized customization or a “kit of parts” construction catalog. Final deliverables were to include a Revit BIM model for integrated building systems (biogas, solar PV, solar hot water, rainwater harvesting, etc.) from single residence to clustered compound living.

Visit the Anam New City Blog.