Sustainable Building Design in Kenya

Sustainable design strategies involve complex interactions among social, economic and environmental factors those should be analyzed and solved quite differently by heterogeneous disciplines and stakeholders involved. Focusing on the cities of developing countries in tropical regions, characterized by fast urban population growth and a staggering increase in the energy consumption for building sector, it emerges that appropriate active strategies and building energy optimizations are promptly recommended. For this purpose, in the present work, energy evaluations were carried out for the designing of a residential building in Nairobi, Kenya, considering different strategies and solutions, taking into account also the affordability and considering the possibility to push local based economies through the use of built-on-site materials. This strategy may lead to a significant cost reduction and energy saving due to lower construction costs and in addition also a lower embodied energy of the building materials. Furthermore, in a region understudy, characterized by unstable economic security, the employment of local labor forces may lead to the formation of local based economies.