ARCHIVE Global

What’s your favorite color?  Is it blue?  Blue is by far the most popular color in the Western world, with almost half of both men and women choosing it as their favorite.  It also happens to be the favorite color of the tsetse fly, the insect which is infamous for carrying the parasite responsible for sleeping sickness, also known as African trypanosomiasis.  Researchers working in Uganda have begun to exploit this detail about the tsetse fly in order to combat the disease, an effort that could potentially end the threat of sleeping sickness for the millions at risk in sub-Saharan Africa.

Sleeping sickness is a parasitic infection caused by the bite from the tsetse fly. The infection spreads throughout the infected person’s bloodstream, causing such symptoms as fever, headaches, swollen joints, mood swings, daytime sleepiness, and possible death. The disease has had quite a few epidemics in the last century; the most recent of which was in the 1990s and had an estimated 300,000 cases with around 40,000 official diagnoses and treatments. Correctly diagnosing this infection remains difficult, as it shares symptoms with other diseases commonly found in Africa such as tuberculosis, malaria, HIV, and typhus. Therefore, a correct diagnosis is dependent on laboratory tests, which are costly and ultimately impractical for the affected population who generally live in poor and rural communities.

Tsetse Fly Net (Image Credit: Nevit Dilmen)

Since detecting and treating sleeping sickness is a complicated process, research has instead focused on preventative methods to reduce number of people affected. The total number of cases has dropped significantly in recent years, and the World Health Organization hopes that the disease will be eliminated by 2020. In Uganda, researchers from the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine have developed a unique method to fight this disease.  The tsetse fly happens to be very attracted to a certain blue color, which the researchers have utilized by making targets of blue cloth saturated with insecticide. These targets are placed along the shores of river banks, which are the natural breeding grounds of the tsetse fly and near to human settlements.  This is certainly a groundbreaking opportunity to eradicate sleeping sickness in Africa, as this effort is cheap, sustainable, and actually seems to be working.  In the past six months, people have placed 35,000 targets alongside the rivers of Uganda, and entomologist James Aroba estimates that there has been up to a 90% reduction in the tsetse fly’s population. Experts are now planning to use these targets alongside rivers in other affected countries, particularly the Democratic Republic of Congo, which accounts for around 80% of the world’s sleeping sickness cases.

Ending sleeping sickness, however, is a relatively small accomplishment for international health.  There are many other diseases that will continue to wreak havoc around the world, making the future health systems of susceptible communities very uncertain.  But what the global community can perhaps learn from the fight against sleeping sickness is the importance of finding unique and different ways of prevention.

When you think of a heat wave in New York City, an extended period of really hot uncomfortable days might come to mind. However, heat waves are more than just uncomfortable, they can be deadly. They are associated with dehydration, heat rash, heat cramps, fainting, heat exhaustion, heat stroke, emergency room visits and death. In the United States, heat waves are the deadliest extreme weather event, killing on average more people than hurricanes, lightning, tornadoes, and floods.

The eminent threat of climate change will only exacerbate this public health problem. As greenhouse gases continue to be spewed into the atmosphere and global temperatures increase, the intensity and number of heat waves will continue to increase along with it. Climate models predict that by the 2080s the number of heat waves per year will be triple that what it is today. This means hotter summers, more frequent heat waves, and the negative health outcomes that come along with them.

During heatwaves the most vulnerable are the elderly, those living in poverty, and those with underlying health conditions, and often they don’t even know they are at risk. Social networks also play a critical role in the risk of heat waves.Those living in communities without strong community networks are at risk because they might not have a family member or neighbor to check up on them and ensure that they are doing okay during a heatwave.

An apartment building in Battery Park City that incorporates a green roof and a rooftop park into it’s design.

New York City is already considerably hotter than surrounding areas because of the urban heat island effect, which is attributed to the lack of vegetation and abundance of dark and impervious surfaces such as roofs, sidewalks, and roads. These surfaces efficiently absorb and trap solar radiation, rather than reflecting it back into the atmosphere, and cause warming of the air and surface temperature.

This effect often makes buildings extremely hot, and as heat rises, the top floors in high-rise buildings can be as much as 15 degrees hotter than outside temperatures, as was seen in the Chicago 1995 heatwave. According to the Center for Disease Control, in NYC the home was where the majority of heat-related illnesses occurred that resulted in hospitalization and fatal cases. In these fatal cases, none of the deceased had access to a working air conditioner. This makes having access to air conditioners extremely important, which makes having electricity important, and in turn, electricity demand is highly sensitive to increases in temperature: during heat waves, the electrical grid can often near the maximum power availability due to high demand, and if overloaded, can lead to a blackout.

In New York City people are at risk of dying because their homes are just too hot and people who have air conditioners are at risk if a blackout occurs. According to a study done by Urban Green Council, the amount of window area, amount of air that escapes through walls, and the amount of insulation in walls and roofs greatly influence temperatures during a blackout and should be considered in the construction of new buildings, as well as the renovation of older buildings. Buildings like these would not only be energy efficient but would also make a world of a difference in protecting us against extreme heat if a blackout should occur. In addition to energy efficient buildings, we can tackle part of the urban heat island effect by changing the way we design roofs. Roofs can be painted white to reflect solar radiation, or planted with vegetation which can remove heat from the air through evapo-transpiration; both would help to cool surrounding areas.

Above: A series of graphics released by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) in the 30’s and 40’s with the onset of public housing construction.

When the United States’ first public housing was built in 1935 in New York City, the initiative marked the beginning of the end of New York’s rampant tenement slums. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, who himself had lost his wife to tuberculosis attributable to poor housing, had joined Louis H. Pink (of the eponymous Pinks housing project in Brooklyn), who was Chairman of the State Board of Housing, to create the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). The overcrowded, poorly ventilated, unsanitary, and crime-ridden NYC slums would be swept away by a grand effort of publicly funded, thoughtfully planned living complexes that would bring dignity and well-being to New York’s working classes. Yet today, nearly a century later, the projects are arguably the closest thing New York has to the slums of its past (or of developing countries). There are all the familiar symptoms: overcrowding, poverty, crime, and poor health. Long a subject of debate and concern for New Yorkers, public housing has recently made its way further into the spotlight with the increasingly rapid gentrification throughout the city’s five boroughs, but more importantly, NYCHA’s alarming recent financial crisis.

The now infamous Pink Houses in Brooklyn, built in 1959 and named after Louis H. Pink, who helped create the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA).

Like most public housing to this day, New York’s projects were built in what is known as the tower-in-the-park style, an adaptation of the housing complexes described in Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine, or Contemporary City. Notwithstanding for a moment the many criticisms about the paternalism or megalomania of one man thinking he might resolve socioeconomic disparities with a few pages of design, the Ville Contemporaine was a nice idea: green spaces for everyone, big roadways where all classes drove and strove together, and even cleverly L-shaped apartments that came together tetris-style to ensure that every unit had light shining throughout their apartment at all hours of the daytime. The bottom line was that a way needed to be found to provide dignity and well-being to the city’s poor, and cheaply, particularly with the onset of urbanization. That’s more than we can say for the vast majority of development today. And while public housing in NYC lacks most of the flourishes of Le Corbusier’s original plans, they were a groundbreaking improvement from the slums they replaced: a fact that many today forget when they rail public housing’s inhumanity. So what happened? How did they get to where they are today?

The First Houses: The United States’ first public housing, built in 1935 and still in existence on 3rd Street and Avenue A.

To start, public housing was not originally intended to house the city’s poorest, but rather select segments of the working class, particularly the middle class that had been temporarily disenfranchised by the Great Depression. After World War II, a series of benefits and low-interest mortgages were targeted to white people living in public housing, allowing them to move out, but leaving an impoverished and predominantly minority population. This issue was part of a broader development and debate over who the public housing should serve. Tenant screening and tenant policies were enacted in different ways, with some pushing for residents to be traditionally ‘bonafide’ citizens, employed, and show a commitment to self-improvement, while others felt the housing should serve those who were most marginalized and powerless.

This debate materialized in a particularly muddled way through the introduction of income limits and maximum rents in the 40’s and 50’s: essentially, residents could be evicted if their income surpassed a certain level, only to face the disproportionately more expensive private housing market (public housing rents were required to be 20% less than the lowest market rates). This was enacted mainly so as not to threaten the private sector, who saw public housing as a danger and preferred that it remain focused on the poorest, who could not afford private housing anyway. This aspect, along with the housing authorities’ insistence that the projects be segregated, and compounded by racial minorities’ pre-existing challenges to upward mobility, created cycles of poverty.

Another source of contention for public housing in the United States as a whole, and arguably the most important, has been its financing. From the very start, the limited rent income could not keep up with maintenance and repairs, even with federal funding. As repair and maintenance costs increased with aging buildings, federal support was also decreasing: public housing was seen as a failed experiment and a symbol of urban decay. In the 60’s and on into the 80’s, the private sector was sought as an alternative through the public financing of private subsidized housing developments, but this unfortunately led to widespread embezzlement of public funds and corrupt practices that caused extensive building disrepair, mortgage defaults, foreclosures, and even entire blocks of vacant, boarded-up homes. For many cities across the U.S. such as Chicago and St. Louis, public housing projects were shut down.

The majority of NYC’s public housing is located in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx, each with around 100 developments and 50,000+ apartments. Staten Island and Queens have 10 and 22 developments, respectively.

Even so, New York’s public housing carried on with relative success: today, NYCHA still houses over 400,000 New Yorkers, with an average household income of $22,000 and an average gross rent of $436. This is in a city with a median income of $50,000 and an average rent of around $3800.  A quarter of a million more are on the waiting list to get in. And yet with city and state funding decreasing drastically particularly in the last decade, NYCHA now has a $77 million budget deficit, and needs $18 billion in upgrades and repairs. The conditions of the houses have been long overlooked, and a recent class-action lawsuit found NYCHA responsible for rampant mold and moisture problems that were directly impacting residents’ health.

All of this is occurring along with some of the most rapid gentrification in New York City’s history, a new form of ‘hyper-gentrification’ as some are calling it. Many of the projects now lie on some of the city’s most prime real estate. This has led to increasing demand for privatizing some of the projects’ units, either by leasing or even selling, which proponents say could give NYCHA much needed income. Even the wide open courts and promenades that are typical of project housing are now being considered as a potential space for private development. On the other hand, champions of public housing state that the projects are an institution that is at the heart of New York City’s culture, and that substantial state and/or city funding needs to be reinstated, citing as comparison the hundreds of millions of dollars invested in baseball stadiums by both the state and city.

As you may have noticed, we launched our newest project this week! The High Fives project extends the work of our latest pilot flooring project in Savar, Bangladesh, where dirt floors were converted to concrete floors. This simple intervention, along with health and hygiene awareness workshops, can yield dramatic returns in health, especially for children under the age of five. “Childhood mortality is at the forefront of development discussions right now. ARCHIVE has a simple, cost-effective housing design that can drastically impact the rate at which children are dying,” says Peter Williams, ARCHIVE Executive Director....Read More Here

Our understanding of health is often shaped by our environment.  The health problems that plague one country can be alien to another.  In the developed world, our daily health-promoting behaviors are informed by attempting to avoid non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, obesity, and cancer, but not, for example, necessarily familiarizing ourselves with the bug that carries the parasite which causes Chagas disease.  For this reason, diseases of the developing world breed fear of the unknown, both distant and far away.  I thought tuberculosis was cured in the 19th century…  I’ll never contract a parasite, how do you get one anyway-the jungle?  How do you even pronounce that one – Chikungunya!?!? Read More Here...

Rates of homelessness are steadily increasing around the world.  The number of individuals and families living without homes is growing in both rich and poor nations alike. Estimates vary from 100 million to a whopping 1 billion people living without adequate or any shelter. Particularly alarming is the growing rate of young families and children living without proper shelter. The wide range of estimates can be explained by how exactly scholars, organizations, and governments classify the homeless. The United Nation’s defines homelessness as: “Those households without a shelter that would fall within the scope of living quarters. They carry their few possessions with them, sleeping in the streets, in doorways or on piers, or in any other space, on a more or less random basis.”  While this provides a good working definition, this classification merely establishes the minimum standards for homelessness and therefore presents a relatively smaller, and thereby more conservative, estimate of the global population without access to homes. Read More Here...

I arrived in Cameroon in the middle of the night, quite exhausted from a long journey. I was greeted by Simeon, a driver for our partner organization, and was whisked off to my small hotel in the thick of the dense capital city, Yaoundé. The next day I was replenished with freshly caught karpe fish, fished right before my eyes in a pond neighboring the community of Minkoameyos, where ARCHIVE is working to reduce malaria transmissions. Not only was I impressed to see the project moving along with few hitches and on schedule, but I was also happy to see our creative work taken beyond the construction site and into the community in various ways. -Peter Williams | Executive Director / Founder Read More Here...

The challenges of poverty infiltrate all aspects of well-being, including access to adequate housing, clean water, waste disposal, a variety of nutritious foods, recreational activities, education and healthcare. Globally, we often think of those living in slums and informal urban settings as those who are most affected by conditions of poverty. But we needn’t go as far as the favelas in Brazil or the crowded cities of India in order to find poverty. In Canada, 1 in 6 children live in poverty; in the US, over 20% of children under the age of 18 live in households with incomes below the poverty line. Even in developed countries, conditions of poverty and low income can restrict or even deny access to the essentials required to maintain a healthy household...Read More Here

This is the second feature of our series ‘Photos from Shajjad,’ and follows the pictures from the previous story, “Cloud of Dust”. The accumulation of dust from a construction site in the dry season turns into mud during the monsoon; spillage from insufficient drainage and dustbins may add more. The rain flows over construction sites picking up sediment and other pollutants such as building materials, concrete washout, paint, fuel, wastewater, oil and solvents. The contaminated runoff then enters the what sewage system there is, and is ultimately discharged into local streams, rivers and lakes...Read More Here

It is difficult to imagine a virus much more terrifying than ebola. The infection boasts a fatality rate that can top 90%, has no known cure, and causes gorey symptoms like severe internal and external hemorrhaging. When we read or hear about ebola in the news, it is easy to imagine worst case scenarios, like a devastating global pandemic à la Contagion. Fortunately, we can feel secure in the fact that this risk is highly unlikely, given that surveillance systems in place in most parts of the developed world are capable to finding and isolating such dangerous health threats quickly. Despite the low risk of pandemic, the voracity of the ongoing outbreak in West Africa is certainly worrying for the region, as control efforts seem to be having little impact on the spread of the infection in these areas. Without the availability of a vaccination or a cure, the only way to control the spread of the virus, which is transmitted through contact with bodily fluids, is to find and isolate all potential cases and contacts.Read More Here...

In ‘Short Introduction to Economics,’ Partha Dasgupta describes the issue of family sharing within rural subsistence households, where the ‘market’ cannot provide an adequate medium for exchange. Once they’ve bartered or borrowed within the community, farmers and their families are left with the remainder of that years harvest. The result is a necessary prioritization of resources, and those whose strength is required most, are apportioned greater quantities of food as survival maximization...Read More Here

The majority of labor in low-income countries (LICs) differs from wealthier nations in the scale of formal employment opportunities. The other opportunities available to most, those who are in self-employed, seasonal or rural subsistence and ‘contract only’ jobs, are generally referred to as the informal sector: a concept first promoted in the 1970’s by the Caribbean’s Princeton/Nobel Economist W. Arthur Lewis and the ILO in their World Employment Project working papers on Kenya. This process has largely been expanded into several more methodical typologies based on the urban condition of employment. Read More Here

It’s hard to imagine, in a country where 80% of the population lives on less than $2 per day in relative terms (PPP), that the cost of 50kg of cement is roughly $8 per bag plus delivery; and standard materials, such as dimensional lumber in Haiti, cost as much or more than in the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Read More Here

Slum living is rapidly growing worldwide. Slum populations are estimated to grow by 500 million people between 2010-2020. Most slum growth is occurring in the developing world, and it is estimated that 2 billion people will live in slums by 2030.Read More Here

The 2014 FIFA World Cup has officially started in Brazil, and for the next month frenzied fans across the globe will be stationed in front of TV screens, rooting for their favorite teams. An estimated 3.7 million tourists will descend upon Brazil for World Cup games and other World Cup related activities. Occurring once every four years, the World Cup is taking place in-arguably-the soccer capital of the world (also recognizing that the rest of the world refers to soccer as football). A lot of things come to mind when we think about Brazil. Maybe it’s the religious-like reverence for soccer, the world class beaches, or the Girl From Ipanema. At ARCHIVE, we are always thinking about the world around us in context with health, and the built environment. One thing is for sure, the world’s eyes are locked on Brazil for the next month, and have been for the past year leading up to the games...Read More Here

When we first traveled to Bangladesh to visit the neighboring villages of Panpara and Naya Para back in February, we were there to oversee the implementation of our cement-flooring project. We found the country to be mystifying and intriguing, the people warm and welcoming. They fed us rice and colorful curries till we were full, and then insisted we eat more, calling us sisters and brothers and uncles. Most satisfying though, was that the people we met were eager to help us help them. When we left the country, foreign in ways we could not have expected, we had the feeling we would be back soon...Read More Here