Buildings affect us. They reflect our cultural values and mould our behaviour. “We shape our dwellings,” Winston Churchill said, “and afterwards our dwellings shape us.” Yet in recent times appearance has been admired over purpose, aesthetics over social need.

That may be set to change. Santiago Cirugeda, a subversive architect from Seville, has shunned the glamour, and financial security, of luxury office space for the architecture of activism. In austerity-hit Spain, 500,000 new buildings lie derelict, unemployment is high and funding for community initiatives is minimal. Pulling these threads together, Cirugeda and his team – often working on the fringes of the law – use rapid building techniques, recycled materials and volunteer labour on abandoned municipal land for projects that people need.

In the waterside slums of Port Harcourt, Nigeria, 480,000 residents face the threat of displacement as the government seeks to redevelop their land, claiming urban renewal is necessary for economic development. But Kunlé Adeyemi has an alternative solution. He envisages a city of floating homes that would allow residents to remain within their community, and safe from rising tides, while at the same time improving the quality of their lives.

In Pakistan, Yasmeen Lari is applying skills learned building vast commercial structures and restoring historic national monuments to help communities at risk from flood and earthquake damage. She has built more than 36,000 safe homes and won the UN Recognition Award in the process.

But perhaps most striking of all are the buildings of the Vietnamese architect Vo Trong Nghia. Since the economic boom of the 2000s, population – and pollution – in the country has soared. Only 2.5% of Ho Chi Minh City is “green space” and nine in 10 children under five suffer respiratory illness. Nghia is combatting these problems with green architecture: buildings infused with living plants and trees. “Vietnamese cities have lost their tropical beauty,” he says. “For a modern architect the most important mission is to bring green spaces back.”

Adeyemi’s vision for a floating city of low-cost sustainable floating homes to address the flooding that affects hundreds of thousands of people along Nigeria’s coast. The buildings have a pyramid timber frame to provide a low centre of gravity, protecting them from high winds, and are suspended on more than 250 recycled barrels. Photograph: PR

Spider man: in 2010, Spanish architect Santiago Cirugeda squatted this disused wasteland and established the Big Top, a self-built community centre. Working with volunteers and waste materials, it took five people two days to erect this building, known as the Spider. Photograph: PR

Above it all: Yasmeen Lari, pictured in front of her elevated flood shelter, designed as a response to the 2010 floods in Pakistan, which hit more than 14 million people. Open-sided ground floors allow water to flow up to a height of 7ft, while space on top provides shelter for 20 people and their belongings in case of disaster. Photograph: PR

Roof with a view: Rocinha, in Rio de Janeiro, is the largest favela in Brazil and the epitome of rebel architecture. Ricardo de Oliveira is one of a number of untrained builders who are using local construction materials and traditional building methods to help regenerate the community. Photograph: PR

Vo Trong Nghia is using building design to transform Vietnam’s attitudes to sustainability and urban planning. This still-in-construction Diamond Island Dome is being built entirely from locally sourced bamboo – “It’s the steel of the 21st Century,” Nghia says. “It’s cheap and beautiful … but also durable and eco-friendly.” Photograph: PR

Pot luck: this House for Trees is part of Vo Trong Nghia’s vision to restore tropical beauty to green-starved Ho Chi Minh City. Resembling giant plant pots, each concrete structure features bamboo formwork with a living oak tree on top. Photograph: PR

Rebel Architecture, a six-part series, premieres on Al Jazeera on 18 August (aljazeera.com/programmes/rebelarchitecture)









