America Builds to Resist Disasters. The Global South Builds to Recover

In the last few weeks, as the United States suffered through a record-breaking heatwave, people were instructed to take refuge in buildings with indoor air conditioning. This reliance on a system that runs on fossil fuels and contributes to nearly 20% of our greenhouse gas emissions also inevitably set us up for another, more severe heatwave.

Even as the U.S. faces increasingly frequent – and deadly – climate change-related disasters, we continue to be caught off guard, treating them as short-term inconveniences and not the new normal. Science has proved that we are actively contributing to future climate devastation, and yet we continue to design buildings with an assumption that climate resilience means waiting out disasters, wasting significant energy fighting the symptoms while contributing to the illness.

We need a new definition for climate resiliency, and it may already exist in the Global South.

Modern U.S. buildings are shaped by a philosophy of resistance: buildings resist damage by design, engineered to meet and defeat the greatest expected loads delivered by fire, flooding, treefall or earthquakes, within reason. While this approach provides an immediate response to disaster – protecting human lives by preventing structural collapse and unsafe indoor conditions – it neglects the aftermath, where the greatest loss of life and property can occur. For example, tropical cyclones in the U.S. cause an average of 45 immediate deaths due to flooding, structural collapse and more. However, indirect deaths due to economic disruption, power outages, community collapse, disease spread and mental health issues number in the thousands. We also take years to rebuild homes, businesses and communities, if we ever do.

But in the Global South, people have spent centuries building structures to survive and, more importantly, to quickly recover from disaster.

The Philippines, a country of over 7,000 islands shaped by millennia of volcanic activity, tectonic plate movement, and sea level changes, has been called “the world’s most disaster-prone nation” for 16 straight years by the World Risk Index. It also happens to be where I grew up, in a house built in the 1960s, on an active volcano, in a tropical rainforest, weathering an average of 125 (noticeable) earthquakes and 20 typhoons a year. Despite these conditions, our house was built to last – resilient thanks to a clear delineation between what a building could afford to lose, and what it could not do without.

My childhood home was designed by influential Filipino architect Carlos D. Arguelles, a major proponent of modern architecture in the Philippines and a case study in critical regionalism: adopting modernism’s progressive attitude while remaining contextual. His work blended contemporary construction practices with indigenous design sensibilities, demonstrating a clear understanding of how a building should respond to its local climate and conditions.

Our house had a polished stone floor on the ground level that could drain after flooding, no basement, screens to keep out the larger creatures, jalousie windows with thin glass panels that could be easily replaced, and a lightweight sheet metal roof on a small-scale timber structure that could be sacrificed in a storm and quickly rebuilt.

In 2018, Typhoon Maria flooded our home and caused a tree to fall through our roof; the house was repaired in a week, and we never needed to vacate. The lightweight roof was structurally independent from the interior, allowing it to be damaged while protecting residents and repaired with affordable materials available in town, and floodwater immediately drained away thanks to terraced landscaping and water-resistant stone and concrete on the ground level. This would be virtually unheard of in the United States, a country with twenty times the GDP per capita of the Philippines.

Our house was not air-conditioned, yet it was designed with passive thermal energy transfer in mind; cross-ventilation enabled cool air to flow, stone floors resisted heat from the outside, and large roof eaves kept the hottest sunlight from the inside. These were hallmarks of tropic modernism, a phrase often used to describe the work of modernists in tropical regions like Geoffrey Bawa in Sri Lanka, blending emerging design principles with traditional architectural elements and knowhow. Consequently, we only needed a ceiling fan to keep cool on our warmest, most humid days.

In 1955, fewer than 2% of the United States’ residences had air conditioning, even though the technology had existed for decades. Today, over 88% of our houses are air conditioned, with 66% using fully centralized systems. The greatest leap in residential AC usage occurred in the 1960s, when inexpensive housing construction allowed AC systems to be included as “complementary goods” rather than an added expense, regulatory changes allowed central air to be included in FHA-approved mortgages, incomes were on the rise, and the cost of energy was declining. This led to more reasons for its continued use, like building standards that prioritize insulation, active ventilation and AC, along with a growing preference for colder homes.

As our climate grows increasingly severe, it is time to question our uniform approach to building.

We should design to expect damages, minimize post-disaster disruptions, and build with reconstruction in mind. Proactive zoning could limit new construction to areas with lower vulnerability to natural disasters, building codes and property insurers could include risk tolerances that encourage reparability, and we could reduce our reliance on powered systems by working with passive thermal systems such as solar chimneys and louver sunshades that continue to function during an outage.

Some cities are already launching their own action plans, like Climate Ready Boston or Climate Resilient San Diego, which involve updating local climate projections, identifying vulnerable communities, and suggesting they plan for infrastructure and building retrofits.

But there will be no lasting change if we are not questioning the theoretical underpinning of our most common practices. We should work with our local environments, not against them.

Mohamed Ismail, PhD, is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, where he directs the Open Structures Research Group and works to advance sustainable development through thoughtful structural design. He is a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project in partnership with the Paul and Daisy Soros Foundation.