Research Methodology

illness among these workers. It is one of the most pressing issues concerning these workers since they have been reported to be more sensitive to sudden temperature variations due to high levels of heat exposure during working hours. More than 5,000 construction workers are brought in every month in summer into the emergency room for thermal-shock-related incidents in the UAE (Ali 2010). Mitigating this heat-stress crisis is, therefore, imperative. Passive cooling techniques and a series of transitional spaces can help achieve the required gradual change in indoor and outdoor temperatures to prevent any thermal shock incidences while reducing the dependency on air-conditioning.

This dissertation proposal, therefore, explores the revival of traditional, transitional spaces through the lens of sustainable environmental design in labor camps in Sharjah to enhance these workers’ comfort, health, and well-being.

1.3 Research Methodology

The dissertation is structured into three main scopes of research and intervention: the Inhabitant, the Urban Context, and the Built Form. These research scopes resemble a holistic solution varying from macro to micro scale due to the situation’s complexity.

The Inhabitant

The primary objective of this chapter (chapter 2) is to understand the inhabitants, construction workers, and their living conditions in labor camps in Sharjah, UAE. This includes a literature review of the various aspects of a worker’s life, ranging from demographics and schedules to programmatic and density requirements. This section establishes the proposed occupant definition and key design implications for the purposes of this dissertation.

The Urban Context

This chapter (chapter 5) explores the impact of the outdoors on the built environment. First, it identifies the main external climatic factors influencing indoor comfort: solar radiation, and conductive heat transfer through the building’s envelope, and then sets the urban strategies that can modify the microclimate and quantify their environmental benefits—further, an essential plan.

The Built Form

This chapter (chapter 6) explores transitional spaces such as the courtyard and Liwan (loggia) as a potential passive strategy to be adopted on the scale of the built environment. Also, the chapter explores possible architectural iterations that have been taken forward as guidelines in the design phase.

7

Every evening, the hundreds of thousands of young men who build Sharjah are bussed from their sites to a vast concrete wasteland an hour out of town, where they are quarantined away. Sonapur is a rubble-strewn patchwork of miles and miles of identical concrete buildings. Some 300,000 men live piled up here, in a place whose name in Hindi means “City of Gold”. There, workers have to share a tiny room between 6/8 people, their few belongings are hanged on the wall as there are no closets, they brush their teeth in the shower as there are no wash basin, the food as well is washed in the shower, water is not properly desalinated so workers get easily sick.

-Matilde Gattoni, a photojournalist who has spent a year documenting the living and working conditions of migrant construction workers in the UAE (2012).