Tiny Pallet House Eco-Village
Architect Arthur Dyson is working with students at Fresno State University to build a tiny pallet house eco-village for the homeless. The plan is to use mostly reclaimed building materials like pallets for the structures, cardboard for walls, and aluminum cans for roofing.
The project is still looking for a final location but the city of Fresno, California is working to help make that happen, which is very encouraging. I hope this project is successful and provides another example of how eco-villages for the homeless are viable solutions for everyone.
I first spotted this on Jetson Green. I also want to thank Kent at Tiny House Blog for the heads-up. Photo credit Darrell Wong/The Fresno Bee and Arthur Dyson.
Dignity Village – A Success Story
One of my regular readers, Malcolm, reminded me tonight about a tiny house village in Oregon that was established by a group of homeless folks through successful acts of civil disobedience. The city of Portland now accepts the existence of Dignity Village as a self-regulating, city-recognized “campground”. The Portland City Council has guaranteed the community’s existence through at least 2010 (source). The tiny homes are often built from salvaged building materials by the occupants themselves.
There is much written about the origins and governance of this community on wikipedia and the Dignity Village website but I wanted to point out two very important aspects of communities like this that may go unnoticed. Continue Reading »
Earthbag Eco-village in Uganda
While I make my living as a web designer my education and training is as a potter… which has given me a particularly close bond to… well… dirt. Construction techniques like adobe, rammed earth, cob, and earthbag are really beginning to appeal to me more and more. There’s something about building a home from the earth on the building site that just seems smart, cheap too!
I stumbled on this humanitarian earthbag eco-village project in Uganda on the Earthbag Building Blog the other day and wanted to share it with you. You can also read about the project in much more detail at EarthbagBuilding.com. The design came out of a collaboration between the local people and a team made up of people from Japanese universities.
