The very first idea for my work came to my mind while I was coming back home from my second travel in India. I was in a cab in Mumbai, going to the airport, and from my window I was looking at the very poor houses along the road, wandering about some little and cheap changes that could improve their conditions.

I didn’t know yet, but I was crossing Dharavi, the biggest slum of Asia, the second one in the world (as somebody says, but it’s difficult to give numbers in these cases). Dharavi is an incredible working reality, always moving and growing. More than 1 million people lives there, in a slum too near to the centre of Mumbai to be ignored by economical interests.

I came back to Dharavi after 2 years - in 2008 - and I lived in Mumbai for 3 weeks studying the reality of Indian slums, the bamboo scaffoldings system and trying to do my best for my thesis to be as real as possible (I studied Building Engineering and Architecture at the Politecnico di Milano).

“SHANTITOWN” is a play on the words “shantytown” (meaning slum) and “shanti” (sanskrit word for peace).

The idea is to create a multifunction building system for emergency applied to the case of shantytowns. The frame is made with bamboo simply tied, as the techniques of Asian scaffoldings. The claddings are made with different recycled materials, as typical in cases of necessity.

All the material and the techniques are local, nothing needs to be imported, and local Indian workers can teach people to create their home and to maintain it.

I followed the principles of slum (recycled and cheap material, simple systems, teaching of techniques, multifunctional buildings..) trying to obtain the best comfort possible.

Friday 8 February, 2013

Structural Analysis

The purpose of the structural analysis of Shantitown modulus was to guarantee two of its main principles: the freedom of its composition and the issue of keeping its safety in time. The first point is essential because in a slum like in any other emergency situation people build the spaces they need, so they must be free to open a door for a house or a bigger opening for a shop. The second issue for the structural analysis is connected to a self building system that is built up and checked in time by people themselves.
As a starting point two analyses were performed: a reference model, named “Model 0” was created with Straus software. It is a model where the internal structure is totally closed, with no openings for doors or windows. This model has been analyzed with the loads to identify the critical points of the structure that collapse under the loads. Then those points have been reinforced with secondary beams and that is the basic Model 0 to which all the results of the next analysis will be referred to.


Then a huge series of 3D models have been created to find the safest solution for the structure. Each model starts with the frame of Model 0 reinforced to resist to the loads as previously calculated, then every model have been damaged in its structure, simulating the situation of broken beams or missing beams in random positions, such as the real situation in a slum could be. So the analysis started from the different positions and dimensions of openings to demonstrate that that choice does not have influence on the main structural stability; then the models started to be damaged in a few parts to control the behaviour of the single wall or portal; then the damaging interested the entire structure, always in a totally random way. All the results were useful to control the model and to obtain the final frame, reinforced in its weakest points, where demonstrated by the hundreds of random damaged models. In this way, this final structure is preventively reinforced to avoid its collapse even in case of multiple damages.

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