During his research, Duany says that his team was able to identify four separate classes of Haitians that live in very different ways, and that each home is tailored to their specific needs. To exemplify the model that will be donated, Duany’s revamped design for the since named “Le Cabanon,” home was prototyped and painted a pleasant aqua color for its unveiling last week at a press conference in Miami.
This week in The New York Times, Andrew Revkin published a wake-up call for megacities: Learn from Haiti; you might be next. And the problem is architecture. Earthquakes don’t kill people, he says. Buildings do. “In recent earthquakes, buildings have acted as weapons of mass destruction,” Roger Bilham, a seismologist who Revkin interviews, wrote in Nature. Most of the buildings in the world’s fastest-growing cities are “rubble in waiting.”
