It makes sense to begin with a vision of an eco-sensitive house and then build the larger elements of the eco-sensitive homesteading vision from that base. Let us define a house as a building with living support services which serves as a home.

Currently, one has a building, which is usually not geo-locally appropriate, attached to a set of externally derived services which are centrally generated from a remote location. This general built environment creates systemic dependencies on centralised power structures in return for certain conveniences. These conveniences are then most reliably provided to affluent areas on an “ability to pay” principle.  Those with the least means are then mostly left to fend for themselves.

Imagine a rectilinear building, usually of a Euro-culturally derived design, with services such as electricity, water, and sewage derived from remote locations and supplied by large and centralised service providers. This system is not eco-sensitive and it is not sustainable.  Moreover, it is socio-economically inappropriate in a context of mass poverty with stated social goals toward mass upliftment.

Such a system requires a massive and expensive resource-intensive infrastructure, large-scale government to palliate social imbalances, big businesses to provide services, monolithic finance as the prime mover, and high employment to generate the effective demand which keeps moving the wheels of large commerce necessary to lubricate the drives of the financial system.

South Africa, above most other needs, requires low cost housing for the majority of its residents, its true human potential. Housing that is suitable for the elevation of the human and cultural spirit of its long-suffering majority, and which provides the living support services that make life comfortable, pleasant and motivating, but in a readily affordable and sustainable way.

What is needed is a conception of a geo-locally appropriate building with internally generated living support services within the context of a decentralised infrastructural design as the household unit of more humanly appropriate human settlements for the rapidly urbanising majority of energised but economically frustrated people.

A geo-locally appropriate building is one which suits the specific geological and climactic conditions of the space on which it is built. It is built with locally available materials, even material wastes, such as old tires and other discarded artifacts, local earth and stones, local labour, and by the community in which it resides.  In other words, the building is materially appropriate to its particular place on earth.

But the building must be geo-locally appropriate in other ways, too.  It must be built with other local conditions in mind, such as the arc of the sun, the customary motion of the winds, and the location of springs and wells, for these are all natural resources for heating, cooling, and water and energy provision. In other words, the building should have catchments for sunlight, wind power, rainwater, and morning dew, to name a few.

The ideal of the principle is that as many living support services as possible should be internally generated within the building as self-providently as possible. Even food can be grown within the building while providing a pleasant and uplifting internal contact with nature. Other foodstuffs can be grown on the building, its roof and walls, and in its surrounding yard, even if that is just a small patch. Sewage can serve as compost; in this way generated wastes are reusable as a resource.

The dwelling designs should not be based on rectilinear forms – for curves and irregular uniquenesses are sweeter to the human soul than straight lines and other geometric uniformities which tend to channel rather than free the human spirit.

Rather, one should design home dwellings to uplift the spirit of a country where most will not find work, will not have the collateral to become debt slaves, and will therefore have to become self-provident in a decentralised infrastructure.

Eco-sensitive settlements

Households do not normally exist in isolation, but rather form communities. One material manifestation of a community is a settlement. It matters to the soul what sort of settlement one lives in, who one’s neighbours are, and whether or not one interacts with them directly.

In a country such as South Africa, settlements should self-organise themselves in ways which do not make themselves dependent on large-scale industrial or large-scale centralised systems for production, distribution, coordination, or provision.

Settlements should self-design themselves to be as self-providing, self-coordinating, and self-sufficient as possible. They should self-evolve themselves to be natural, convivial, and ecological. Settlements, especially large ones, should be conceived as a network of fully featured human-scale convivial neighbourhoods. They are best as small units of amicable sociality within a larger enveloping settlement.  This is very African.

Such an approach to human habitat provision probably best fits the informal urbanisation patterns of South Africa and is consistent with the latent characteristics of indigenous cultures, which are more feasible models for solving the current crisis of humanity.

Eco-sensitive delivery

Houses should be designed and built by the community.  Neighbourhoods should be fashioned by those living there, and the settlements should create their own organic delivery and self-organising governance and other operating systems.

What is missing is the co-ordination of vision, expertise, and self-empowerment training. Civil society can provide this necessary loose coordination as a knowledge, awareness, and interlinkage provider to communities. But first, civil society has to free itself of its rapidly growing dependency on the corrupting influences of fictitious capital.

Eco-sensitive financing

South Africa will never be able to grow itself out of poverty or borrow itself out of poverty and it will most certainly never be able to tax enough to redistribute adequately. We have to ask ourselves how we can finance eco-sensitive houses and eco-sensitive settlements and fund the delivery of their development and operation.

Moreover, the increasing need for suitable housing in the context of the long-run global financial breakdown can create a foundation for new monetary and exchange systems in South Africa in a manner replicable across Africa.

The right approach is community-generated financing with State facilitation. It is imperative, a non-negotiable requirement, that neither debt nor taxation be used to finance eco-sensitive homesteading.  All strategies based on loans and taxes should be rigourously avoided.

The main challenges are to make sure there is adequate money provided for the task and to ensure that this money stays and circulates in the community to create thriving micro-economies bursting with vibrant micro-enterprises adequate enough to afford a qualitatively good life to settlement dwellers.