Mr. Le Nhu Nga, a young community architect worked together with community builders on a low cost housing design in Bac Kan. The design is a part of settlement upgrading involving ACVN and members of CDF at the town level.

Capacity building on town wide housing improvement for the poor community in Bac Kan town

1. Background
In 2014, construction material cost increased 2 times more than 2 years ago in Bac Kan city. In which, concrete block brick, which is popular construction material for building the poor’s house, increased 3 times more. As the result, the poor households cannot afford to build the decent house with 20million VND (nearly 1,000USD) like the houses built in Selavip project in 2013.

2. Objective
Making an experiment on using local construction materials to build house for the poor who are living in the degraded house or homeless.

3. Process
    3.1. Discuss with community builder group to identify and collect construction materials for house building
    3.2. Experience sharing with the Nabe.Arc group
    3.3 Brick compressing experiment
    3.4. Test 5 samples of new brick’s resistance
    3.5 Design and produce pressed brick machine
    3.6. Operate pressed brick machine
    3.7 Build the wall from bricks soil to test

Next action plan
    - Organize community meetings in Huyen Tung commune to choose household to build pilot house.
    - YPs with Commune Youth Union will build the pilot house and calculate the real cost for house.
    - Organize a city-wide workshop to share new construction method to the poor households who have need to build house but cannot afford to buy brick.