Born and raised in Beirut and trained as an architect, Nina Rahal-Lott is a women with a vision. After witnessing the dire conditions that Palestinian refugees live in across Lebanon, she is single-handedly attempting to setup a voluntary organisation of environmentalists and architects to help in any way possible to improve the environment of the refugees.

The idea is to improve first the living units of the most needy, such as the elderly and the handicapped,” she explains. “That can begin with simple help, such as thermal insulation, or new hinges for the doors, simple water taps, cleaning their streets and planting trees for them…I will be doing my best to provide sustainable solutions with minimum cost. ”

The conditions of the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon such as the Badawi camp are notoriously poor with sewage running in the streets and houses of low quality. Nina tells me that she is interested in improving the living spaces for the marginalized in Lebanon starting with the Badawi camp which is home to over 13,000 people and one of the worst camps in Lebanon.

There is an estimated 400,000 registered Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, many of whom are denied social and civil rights as well as access to public social services. She added: “Some people who showed some interest in my idea preferred that I keep the Palestinian camps out of this proposal as this may provoke negative responses in Lebanon, due to the political significance. This actually made me more determined to highlight the cause.”

Although Nina is currently living in France, she insists that there is lots that can be done: “I can provide my architectural skills, therefore any required designs and drawings, 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional if needed too, based on any given measurement drawings, photos & surveys of the current living spaces.”

She is also hoping to get schools in Lebanon involved in architecture and the environment to take part and help come up with sustainable solutions to the refugee camp problems. As she states students need to be directly involved with those they are working with and recognise their humanitarian and environmental responsibilities.

When I ask Nina why she thinks the environmental aspects is central to her vision she replies: “The environment was not part of  my own architectural education- we were focusing on the visual aesthetics, functionality of space and even the concept / poetry behind the design, without taking into consideration the impact of all those ideas on the environment.

“I now see our planet burdened by our ill practices, and I am impressed by the contribution of environmental designs on architecture. I do believe there must be an ethical responsibility in all human behaviour towards our environment.”

:: Image via Al Jazeera English/Flickr.

For more on Lebanon and green architecture see:

Beirut Activist Try to ‘Green the Grey’

Beirut is Getting Its First Green-Roofed Tower

Lebanon Rocks Out To Cure The Green Blues

The post Greening The Refugee Camps of Lebanon appeared first on Green Prophet.

The UAE is well-known for its ginormous skyscrapers and oil-guzzling lifestyle, and increasingly Abu Dhabi is making a name for its eco-consciousness, but it can’t be said that our Gulf friends are the go-to people for eco-friendly buildings.

Which is why the UK paper this is Leicestershire has grabbed the following story by its rather slippery horns. Why, they wonder, would the Rutland Primary Care Trust spend £2.3 million on a building made in the UK, rather than one from Europe, and why, six months after its expected installation, is that building still at the Essex container port? En route from the UAE Modcon factory to St. Luke’s Hospital in Market Harborough, where it would have been the new day case unit, the mysterious building became “cosmetically” damaged. Despite earnest efforts by its journalists, the paper was somewhat unsuccessful at getting the Trust to provide succinct details.

In the meantime, £2.3 million of taxpayer money is potentially in pieces. Because of the lack of answers, the paper began to ask a series of other questions.

Why, for example, award the bid to a company in the Middle East when local builders are starved for work?

Roger Crundwell, a partner for Tuke Manton, a London-based architects’ firm which has designed prefabricated units for several private hospitals, told the paper he had never heard of anyone “going that far for one of those before.”

He added that normally these things come from Europe. Germany is said to construct eco-friendly prefab buildings with a speed, tolerance, and reliability that makes them, not the Middle East, the first choice.

Professor David Dernie, head of De Montfort University‘s school of architecture, has a different perspective. He explains that prefab building has come a long way, but that Britain has not caught up. This may explain why local construction companies were not commissioned, though the UAE still seems too far to make the shipping worthwhile.

The Trust insists that the company (which was not available for comment) won the bid through a competitive tendering process that complies with the stiffest European Union procurement legislation. Even so, there are signs that perhaps this was not the best building for the job.

According to this is Leicestershire:

The unit wasn’t going to meet privacy regulations and the contamination area had to be “improved”. Modifications had to be made, which led to the delay. Was that down to a flaw in the design brief, a cock-up on Modcon’s part or new legislation overtaking the plans? We don’t know. We asked the trust whether any of its staff or any of its external advisers had been to see any examples of Modcon’s work first hand. A press officer said that could only be answered as a Freedom of Information request – which can take up to a month to turn around. She didn’t have that information to hand, she said, and didn’t have time to find it.

While the paper may be blowing the story out of proportion, it is worthwhile to consider how globalization enables trade between distant nations and the subsequent environmental impact. A European building may not have been cheaper, economically, but certainly a considerable swath of emissions may have been saved on the shipping bill.

Now taxpayers are lumped with an expensive broken building; and getting the UAE to pay could be a tricky thing to do.

:: this is Leicestershire

More on green building techniques in the Middle East:

Abu Dhabi To Achieve All Five Green Building Pearls

Learn Permaculture & Green Building Techniques in Israel

Jordan’s Princess Samaya Praises Kingdom’s First LEED Building

The post UAE Green Pre-Fab Building Target Of UK Investigative Inquiry appeared first on Green Prophet.