Building Information Modelling as a Tool for Capacity Building for Sustainable Housing Upgrading in Informal Settlements

The success of low income housing projects in the global South, including settlement upgrading, requires the participation of all stakeholders including residents. Howe ve r, traditional participatory methods are limited in involving the wider community, tend to be dominated by specific community interest groups and therefore often fail to enable genuine coproduction and bottom up decisions making. Major technical constraints here relate to tools for wider collaborative practices and information sharing. E merging BIM and related mobile devices can overcome such constraints by facilitating deeper participation of residents and other community stakeholders (e.g., CBOs, NGOs) in housing and community upgrading. The technologies can greatly enhance residents’ capacities to easily participate in the design and execution of upgrading and housing projects. BIM systems can be linked to mobile devices through freely available mobile apps and cloud-based systems that now have increasing penetration among all income groups including informal communities. Accordingly residents’ requirements can be captured through their direct input into the project BIM system and merged with existing housing data to gain in-depth understanding of design optimisations and their implications for housing and occupants. This will also enable virtual assessment of design options by residents and other stakeholders that allows their informed participation in the decision making process. The proposed event, therefore, aims to introduce and critically appraise a new approach to building local community capacities through the use of BIM and mobile technologies in the design and delivery of sustainable housing and settlement upgrading. This will include demonstrating how BIM can be used to collect, analyse and model housing performance data; managing development and upgrading projects’ information; and how residents and other stakeholders can participate constructively in the lifecycle of the sustainable housing and upgrading delivery using emerging mobile/cloud BIM.