Living Spaces and Change
Hi!
It has been a long time since I wrote something on this wall! If you’re reading this, thanks for tuning in to the newest chapter of what has been brewing in my life these days.
Haha, jk!
I have been reading the “Down to Earth” fortnight Magazines since a few months now, and with so much interesting and thought provoking work with every issue, it is hard to not tell everyone about the ‘cool’ things I discover. So the latest issue, dated 16–30 June 2022, mentions thermal cooling in buildings in the context of rising heatwaves across the continent. Ofcourse, adding more and more air conditioing would never solve the problem. In simplest terms, low rise buildings with enough space between each to ensure ventilation and cross air flows, would be a good start to have cooler buildings. From numerous examples throughout the country, one that also strikes out for me is the use fly ash bricks as a better perforimg material as it absorbs more heat than concrete blocks. Ofcourse, the usage of every material depends on the geography. However, the increasing homogenisation of living spaces needs to be countered by the underlying alternatives around us.
It is quite fascinating to come across the re-emergence of many ideas that we saw getting discarded as kids. The idea of high rise buildings was gaining fast momentum in the early 2000s, twenty years later it has become a norm. While we were learning to appreciate the idea of housing like New Yorkers do, the 2020s and the Climate Change is forcing my generation to unlearn the advertised stuff we ingrained. It is almost like challenging many of our beliefs that we thought to be true while growing up. I think with the institutional and material changes gaining eminence in the industry, the behavioural change needs a bigger push. Perhaps this is what pushed the LIFE campaign by Niti Aayog. I am quite sceptical of how much a top down policy could actually influence change, it is upto our conscious minds to recognise little things around us to be able to call for a behavioural one.
Adapting to the upcoming times, particularly as a consumer of goods and manufactured ideas of living, would see another contestations of alternatives. I hope this will bring forth both comfort and conscious consumerism to come together.
