Mark Jones in Bangladesh
Mark Jones, was a participant on the New Zealand Master Class at Awaroa with Ian Athfield, Richard Leplastrier, Peter Stutchbury, Lindsay Johnston in 2008. At that time he was a Director with Architectus in Brisbane. His son Andrew did the Architecture Student Summer School at Pittwater in 2009 and attended our Deerubbin Conference in 2014. Mark has been on 'sabbatical' in England, living in Oxford, where he is completing a Research Masters at Oxford University and he plans to proceed to do a PhD at the Bartlett, University of London. Mark has been completing field research in Dhaka, Bangladesh.
In Dhaka, he has been carrying out interviews and fieldwork in two slums uncovering useful data in relation to the social sustainability impacts of the current system of energy supply. Over 40 interviews in Korail slum over two days. Most people have just one light and one fan* (no other appliances), each of which costs $3 a month. They struggle to meet this cost and endure the threat not only of disconnection, but also violence at the hands of the corrupt middle man who supplies them with illegal electricity.
The premise is that household solar power for urban slums (initially subsidised by international funds) would deliver substantial social benefits, along with the obvious global environmental and local economic benefits. The barriers to this are immense, but the impact of rolling out fossil fuel generation to billions of poor people would be catastrophic.
While in Dhaka, he worked the wonderful 'ozetecture' network and met up with local architect Naim Kibria who was a participants on the 2009 Glenn Murcutt Master Class and the 2011 Irish European Master Class. Naim's very lovely community school project can be seen on the 'Ozetecture Community Blog' -
http://ozetecturecommunity.blogspot.com.au/2016/06/bangladesh-naim-ahmed-kibria.html