MTHUNZI CENTRE RENOVATION Tag: #Strategic plan #Retrofit #Expansion #Children hosting centre Team: School of Sustainability, MCA, ArCò, LAP Where: Lusaka, Zambia Year: 2018 Area: 400.000 mq Type: Workshop Client: Amani The workshop for the renovation of the hosting community for children Mthunzi Centre in Lusaka is an initiative of NGO Amani, which is its manager. The idea aims to improve the strategic organisational setup of the community in a social-economic sustainable development perspective and at the same time to enlarge and renovate the existing structures. The strategic plan is founded on 5 pillars / resources: people, soil, water, energy, waste. In the strategies the resources interwine and foster each others, showing how in a sustainable community each element is useful to another one. The centre is located on a 40 hectares wide area, whose just a little part is inhabited and only 3 hectares is cultivated, while the remaining part is unused. The key element of the project is to recovery the productivity of the land, using the rainy season and the slight slope of the soil. Since the energy supply isn’t continous, the agricultural system has to be omptimized in a passive way: a system of tanks stocks the rainwater and spread it through a network of channels branching on all the cultivable soil, using just the gravity to irrigate wide plots. In order to engage the resident community and to spread the know-how a School of Agriculture, a Market and a Seed Bank are installed. The growing community, hosting every year more kids and more volunteers, needs also new structures for the accomodation. Part of the intervention is to renovate the extisting building, installing a new roof which improves the shading and the harvest of water. The new buildings are the new Guest House for the volunteers and a settlement for the Moba, the boys who grew up in the community and when become adult leave the centre but keep on living in the community, working and giving a contribution to the development. The new buildings are made of locally sourced rammed earth, bamboo and waste material, respecting the principles of vernacular architecture of thermal mass and natural ventilation.
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