Atayal bamboo houses take root in Nepal, building resilient homes together

Text / Liu Yijun (Associate Research Fellow, National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction)

To help a group of flood victims forgotten by society, members of the Atayal people from Taiwan traveled thousands of miles to impoverished settlements in Nepal, combining indigenous traditional wisdom with local knowledge to jointly build homes that are flood-resistant, earthquake-resistant and climate-adaptive.

The threat of climate risk: the struggle to survive amid repeated displacement

The Ban-Khate settlement, located on the plains of southwestern Nepal near the Indian border, is shrouded in a hot, humid atmosphere. Low houses built close together stand in front of a dense forest, cracks of varying lengths spreading freely across gray plastered walls, and tilted window frames and half-collapsed roofs look all the more dilapidated under the sunlight.

Here, time passes especially slowly. Several cattle and goats lower their heads to graze in the barren fields; a few elderly people sit blankly under the eaves, gazing ahead with dim, indifferent eyes; and women holding infants gather in twos and threes in the shade to chat.

This is a settlement composed of traditional village/street singers (Gandarbha or Gainey) and blacksmiths (Kami), who belong to the lowest "untouchable" caste under Nepal's deeply entrenched caste system. This ethnic group originally lived in the hills around Banke District, but because repeated climate disasters destroyed the natural resources on which they depended for their livelihood, they had to migrate to nearby towns to make a living. With no money at all, they could only use bamboo, branches and tarpaulins to make simple shelters, temporarily settling beside Nepal's east-west highway.

After spending several months by the roadside, they were relocated to open land next to a government building. After nearly two years, in early 2007, these families were relocated again to the Ban-Khate area; with funding from civil society organizations, local building craftsmen used mud, animal dung and bricks to build eight simple houses to resettle these displaced families (Figure 1).

This area was originally a desolate, uninhabited place, with naturally flowing river channels winding in and out of view among mixed woods (Figure 2). Because the terrain is flat and low-lying and there are no water conservancy facilities at all, during the rainy season from mid-May to the end of September, affected by monsoon rainfall from India and the Bay of Bengal, scenes of flooding everywhere are common. The families resettled here face frequent flood threats every year. At the least, furniture, stoves and other basic household items are damaged, and livelihood sources such as crops and livestock are also affected; in severe cases, houses are damaged or even washed away. During the flood season each year, these families are forced to temporarily move out of their houses, carrying their few belongings on their heads and wading through water to take shelter at a local school, usually staying for anywhere from 7 to 30 days.

Because of their special social class, they are easily excluded by other groups when taking shelter, and because school resumes and other factors, these families often can only avoid flooding by temporarily renting housing elsewhere; only after the flood recedes can they return to their devastated homes.

The repeated losses caused by flood events, as well as the resulting expenses for temporary rent and house repairs, trap these families in a vicious cycle of extreme poverty; because they lack livelihood skills, most of the young and middle-aged men in the settlement have to leave their hometowns and go far away to cities to work, just to support household expenses. The government's indifference after relocation and resettlement, society's discrimination and unequal treatment, and year after year of floods have left these families without any expectations for the future and taking no action against disasters, hoping only to survive the next flood.

Blending local knowledge and transferring technology: from Taiwan's mountain forests to Nepal's plains

The Atayal people, distributed across the mountainous areas of northern Taiwan, traditionally lived by hunting and slash-and-burn mountain farming, so whenever they moved to a new place to clear land, they often used local materials and worked together to build settlements. Traditional Atayal houses standing among the mountain forests mainly use moso bamboo, wood, mountain vines and stones as building materials; warm in winter and cool in summer, and able to block wind and rain, they are green buildings built according to ancestral wisdom.

Recognizing the advantages of bamboo houses, such as using natural materials, low construction cost and simple building techniques, the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan General Assembly's "Church and Society Committee" (hereinafter referred to as the Church and Society Committee) decided to use the remaining funds raised for Nepal disaster relief to help these displaced families in Ban-Khate, introducing the Atayal bamboo house architectural form so that they could coexist with floods and face the threat of extreme climate.

The Church and Society Committee teamed up with the Ministry of Science and Technology's "National Science and Technology Center for Disaster Reduction" and the University of Salford's "ThinkLab" in the United Kingdom as disaster prevention partners, and in December 2018 went to Ban-Khate, Nepal to conduct a feasibility assessment, after which they proposed the resilient home concept. Through collaborative cooperation with INGO/NGO organizations and the local government (Baijath Rural Municipality), this humanitarian aid project was officially launched in March 2019 and completed the construction of eight bamboo houses in March 2020.

For poor families, property losses and housing damage caused by disasters put their lives and livelihoods in great difficulty, so the initial goal of this project was set as reducing the impact of floods and alleviating flood losses. In view of the fact that flooding is an unavoidable "natural phenomenon" in this settlement, the project team initially planned to adopt an elevated flood-prevention architectural design strategy, building stilt houses to create housing that coexists with water in response to frequent flooding during the rainy season. However, the families living in Ban-Khate are mostly elderly people, people with physical and mental disabilities, women and children on ordinary days. Considering the residents' characteristics and daily life patterns, elevated houses would make it very inconvenient for residents to come and go; after consultation with the settlement families, and taking into account factors such as the local environment, flood patterns and existing building structures, it was decided to propose architectural design plans for two house types (Figure 3).

For houses washed away by floods, new elevated bamboo houses will be built on the original sites, with the floor height set according to the highest flood level in 2014 (Figure 4). For existing mud houses, renovation will be carried out by building a second floor on top of the existing houses and adding indoor stairs. During floods, the second floor can serve as a place for vertical evacuation, effectively avoiding loss of life and property, while in ordinary times it can serve as additional living space, easing crowding when family members working away from home return (Figure 5).