Hello! This website was created to consolidate, document, and present our collaborative research into sustainable mosquito control through the lens of our built environment. This project is expansive, taking place over multiple countries and with many collaborators from different backgrounds. We all have the same goal, which is the eventual eradication of mosquito-borne diseases, which plague millions of people world wide.
Mosquitoes adapt to not only survive, but thrive in human habitats. Across the globe, we all have similar features to our built environment – food, shelter, water, community – but they vary hugely from place to place. Similarly, while the mosquito species relies on certain resources being available, they adapt to suit each place’s customs and structures to obtain those resources. Climate change, population growth, rapid urbanization and insecticide resistance are amplifying the global risk of pathogen-carrying mosquitoes. These issues also increase the importance of community-specific interventions tailored to meet more individualized needs and cultures.
This project explores a reconfiguration of knowledge and disciplinary skills to meet this ever-evolving challenge. Bringing together international and local entomologists, architects, social scientists, public health specialists, engineers and artists, we will model novel strategies to tackle the wicked problem of mosquito control in Tanzania and Brazil. The team draws upon long-term interdisciplinary collaborations in these two countries and award-winning work in sustainable design to formulate integrative methodologies and operational frameworks for community-driven innovation. Through a series of ‘entomological happenings’, we will design and build prototypes to help address the fraught connections between disease risk, makeshift housing and urban water management.
Stay tuned!