The concept of green and healthy housing has been introduced in China to deal with climate issues in the housing sector. Green housing development requires a complex socio-technical transition based not just on green materials or technologies, but also, and most importantly, on the behavioural transition of housing market actors.
Besides tourists, China also exports prefabricated housing, aptly named “Green and Healthy Housing”, in the form of hotels, hospitals, student dormitories and social housing.
Such buildings are finished as far as possible in factories in China and shipped in container form to the final destination.
The manufacturer, the Aohua Group, was established in 2007 and is a real estate development company located in China. By using green technology in its housing and promoting an environmentally friendly lifestyle, Aohua Group has gained many awards and received recognition for the millions of yuans that it has donated to charity. Aohua Group follows a company policy of “Honesty, Trustworthiness, Dedication, and Professionalism,” and it strives to continuously reform and improve its environment and economy.
Such buildings are less wasteful and energy-consuming during construction, cheaper and faster to build, and more ecological during use. Hotels, including five-star resorts, are increasingly being built around the world. They do not look like boring boxes or Eastern European-style “Plattenbauten,” as they could be found in the 1980s from East Berlin to Ulaan Baatar.
When this author visited one of these factories, which not only includes a big and very well-designed Museum of Windows and Doors (probably the only one in the world) but also production sites covering an area probably similar to Luxembourg or Andorra.
Fortunately, the concept also includes the transfer of knowledge on how to design, manage the project, and assemble the buildings in the form of academic courses based on Tsinghua University curricula so that future developers and architects from Nigeria to Japan can work independently with the raw materials coming from China.
This should avoid any allegations that China is damaging the local building industry or taking away local jobs.
Such buildings can substantially lower the global ecological footprint of the world’s hospitality and tourism industry. Discussions about the sustainability of tourism and hospitality often forget the impact of the production of hardware like streets, aircraft, cruise ships, and buildings.
News that China and India have ended a four-year-long conflict about their border regions should help to make NICE even more relevant. Maybe India will soon even allow the necessary use of Indian airspace for international flights using the Chinese-built and—financed airport in Pokhara, Nepal, two years after its completion.