The Earth Construction Fallacy: Hassan Fathy’s New Gourna Revisited

The problems of earth construction uptake as a building technology in the Global South have long been recognized. The classic response to the low uptake has been newer compositions of construction earth blocks and biobased materials in one form or another. Nevertheless, the profession’s modern origins of earth construction stem from responses to the destructive impact of concrete and fired brick. Relieving the destructive environmental impact using biobased and earthen materials led to many earthen construction products with low uptake. This paradox remains unresolved despite recent advances in the fabrication of earthen construction technologies using agro and non-agro-waste materials or the creation of new earth-building construction standards and new building materials engineers’ efforts. This article reevaluates New Gourna in Luxor, Egypt, after 70 years of its creation, as a sustainable earth-based community in Luxor, Egypt, and whether earthen construction buildings and communities are socially and environmentally sustainable. Based on a field visit and interviews with local experts and users’ current debates on the uptake of earthen construction and its sustainability, it outlines the intellectual origins of sustainability and analyses whether its theory supports the earthen construction hypothesis: earthen construction is more economically and socially sustainable than concrete construction. It concludes that conceiving buildings using earth and biobased resources in terms of materials with low environmental impact is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve the goals ascribed to social acceptance, climate resilience, and economically viable communities. Instead, conceiving the buildings in terms of a long-term and participatory process holds more promise in attaining the elusive goal of a sustainable built environment. The study provides recommendations to inform funding and development aid agencies like the World Bank and the EU on the importance of adopting a holistic and multicriteria approach.