Abstract
Today, 600 million people in Africa do not have access to electricity and 900 million lack access to clean cooking facilities (International Energy Agency- 2019).
 With this premise the paper will explain the research agenda of the African Off-grid Housing project on how to design and build off-grid and affordable housing solutions for the African Sub-Saharan context. The on-going project is developed at the School of Architecture and Cities of the University of Westminster with the support of the Global Challenge Research Fund. The research agenda is based on the idea of producing innovative knowledge able to bridge traditional and advanced design strategies as well as construction technologies in response to the urgent need of affordable housing in the African region. Therefore, the [AOH] research by design methodology is informed by the analytical study of the cause-effects relations between the architectural geometry, the material systems and the environmental performances of a set of pre-colonial and contemporary precedents in relation to their climatic context.
 According to this analysis the most flexible and affordable vernacular genotype was selected, integrated and evolved according to a series of contemporary performative criteria through a design methodology based on a parametric approach.
 Therefore, the form finding of this initial housing genotype was informed by the negotiation between the sitespecific climatic conditions, the spatial and energy needs of local users and the material systems available on-site. The performative criteria of the form finding included the question of self-sufficiency in relation to energy, water and food accessibility. The best negotiation between the different criteria, has been selected and developed as a paradigm to generate a design protocol and a construction kit open to possible variations in terms of scalability and incrementality.
Highlights
The purpose is to define innovative ideas to shape the design to build methodology for affordable and self-sufficient housing in Africa.Such methodology will be informed by the interrelations between a critical understanding on how climatic and social dynamics are affecting African vernacular housing and other performative criteria related to self-sufficient housing precedents in contemporary architecture
This research proposes a set of considerations to inform design methodology: As reported by the UNECA (Demographic Profile of African Countries; March 2016)[2] the population in Africa is growing faster than expected: if we consider that in year 1980 the estimation was 478 billion rather than the current 1.2 billion
One of the key aspects of such scenario is the unaffordability of informal housing in African cities if we consider that 60% of the people living in African urban areas are living in slums
Summary
Manuscript received 3 September, 2021; revised 23 November, 2021; accepted 5 January, 2022; published 19 January, 2022 Its ecosystems have already suffered disproportionately from the effects of climate change and global warming Such informal scenario provides the majority of the housing solutions across the region, contributing around threequarters of the total housing stock ( data on the informal housing sector in Africa is scarce). In year 2019 high rainfall was recorded in the later part of the year in east Africa This complex scenario suggests the need to develop a sustainable local industry approach for affordable and performative housing solutions in Africa. Such an approach would require the development of an information-based knowledge with the aim of evolving indigenous techniques and self-sufficient housing typologies
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