A Multidisciplinary Approach as an Assumption for Design Sustainability in Developing Countries

Abstract The research proposal (framed within the Polisocial Award 2015-2016, a competitive call for research and social responsibility of Politecnico di Milano) concerns a project application experimentation to verify methodology that can be repeated in contexts similar to that under consideration, with the aim not so much of defining prefabricated modules that can be proposed in an undifferentiated manner and detached from the context and environment in which they are inserted, but rather to develop a useful method in a conscious design practice of new interventions. The project focuses on Mongue, a location in southern Mozambique located on a promontory at the end of the peninsula in Inhambane bay. We intervene on Mongue not only for its specific prerogatives, but also because it is considered as an exemplary point of transcalar application of a methodological proposal of analytical and design intervention of a more general nature, which can bring to the attention some general objectives that are considered important for Mozambique as a whole. The title Mo.N.G.U.E. is also an acronym for Mozambique, Nature, Growth, University, Education, which are the themes addressed by the research project: the theme of nature, environment and landscape, associated in Mozambique with a condition of both fragility and potential, addressed locally with the Municipal Ecological Park project; the theme of growth, understood as qualitative development; the university as the engine of the country’s economic and civil development, expressed through the project of a research center dedicated to environmental issues linked to the Pedagogical University of Maxixe; widespread education that today also extends to childhood, with the project of a nursery school for the Mongue community. The results of the research project were not only made possible thanks to a transcalar approach, concerning an analysis of the African and Mozambican, as well as local context, but also were founded on multidisciplinary assumptions, thanks to which it was possible to define different project levels in order to arrive at a common goal. The collaboration of the architectural, urban, territorial and landscape field – together with conservation of historical buildings and existing heritage issues, technical structural and bioclimatic topics, environmental and energy sustainability, economic enhancement and financial sustainability, management and maintenance of buildings – has provided the research project with an added value of general interest: the possibility, through an operational synthesis that overcomes the distinctions of separate approaches, to consider the complexity that affects, at all scales, not only the specific case examined, but in general all the spaces of our living. Through the transcalar and multidisciplinary approach, it was possible to define a broad territorial and local knowledge framework and a project masterplan which, with the aim of pursuing real sustainability at the methodological level, was based on the basic themes of architecture making: the relationship with the soil, climatic conditions, available resources. A project that bases its assumptions on this, naturally leads to the configuration of sustainability, in terms of material resources and as a response to the present and traditional uses.