Sustainability versus Development: Towards a Sustainable Evolution of Local Building Technology

Global sustainable development aims to improve living conditions in developing countries to a level that is comparable with western circumstances. At the same time there are consequences like the increase of the consumption of energy, resources and the production of waste that we must be aware of. Together with the continuous growth of the economy in the rich part of the world, this may have an alarming impact on the environment. Building activities will therefore have to drastically decrease their major contribution to environmental degradation as a whole. In western countries the willingness to use environmentally-friendly building methods is growing slowly. By contrast, we see that developing countries are moving from traditional and usually clean ways of building to more modern but less sustainable building technologies. To guide this development in a better direction, a limitation to the growth and a correction in the distribution of wealth is necessary on a global scale. As far as building activities in western countries are concerned, this means taking more extreme measures to make building technology sustainable, but also reducing new building production via a critical reflection on the real need for space and the corresponding building capacity. For developing countries the question is how prosperity should grow without serious environmental degradation. One option is demonstrated and discussed in the results of a case study in Egypt. The contribution to sustainable building, in this example, involves more attention to maintenance and improvement of the building heritage and local building technology in connection with a critical and environmentally conscious application of western building methods.