Tanzania’s purpose-built Star Homes brighten health outcomes
The houses’ architecture is both cleaner and greener
Poor architecture can be a public health crisis. And in Tanzania, moving families into specially designed Star Homes has resulted in a marked reduction in the spread of deadly diseases among the children living in them.
Old vs. new housing
Designed by researchers, Star Homes are “novel double-story” houses that “provide an insect-proof, cleaner, cooler and smoke-free environment, with a reliable supply of water and sanitation,” said the study. They have “screened facades to allow airflow while keeping out insects, bedrooms on the top floor because mosquitoes mostly stay close to the ground, and an outdoor latrine and a system to harvest and store rainwater to help reduce the spread of diarrheal diseases,” said Science. They also have a “rodent-proof storage room, self-closing doors and a solar-powered electric light.”
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To test the new housing, scientists randomly placed households with children under age 13 in either “110 Star Homes or in 513 traditional mud and thatched-roofed houses,” said the study. After 36 months, children living in Star Homes had a “significantly reduced risk of malaria (44% reduction), diarrhea (27%) and ARIs (18%) compared to children living in traditional mud and thatched-roof homes.”
The improved housing also led to a “reduction in stunting,” where children under age 5 were “taller for their age than those living in traditional homes,” said the study. Healthier children are the “ultimate measure of success,” said Salum Mshamu, the lead field investigator of the Tanzanian research consulting firm CSK Research Solutions, to The Architect’s Newspaper. “Reducing stunting has lifelong consequences for education, earnings and well-being.”
More for less
The findings show that “architecture can function as a health intervention on a par with medicine when it’s developed and documented using scientific methods,” said Jakob Knudsen, the lead architect of the Star Homes, to The Architect’s Newspaper. Traditional homes in Tanzania and other sub-Saharan countries tend to “absorb heat during the day and discharge it into the houses at night,” said The Architectural Review. “High interior temperatures lead to low use of bed nets (temperature rises further inside the net), increasing the risk of mosquito bites.”
The Star Home solves many of these problems and “costs 24% less in materials than a conventional single-story cement-block house, requires 73% less concrete and generates 57% less embodied carbon,” said a release about the study. “We now hope that the building industry will adopt some of the important features of our healthy house design,” said Steve Lindsay, a professor of biosciences at the U.K.’s Durham University and the author of the study, in the release. Better building practices can “turn a dangerous home into a safe one.”
