Designing with Nature, Designing for Dignity

How systems-thinking sustainability can strengthen and uplift rural communities in South Africa

by Tienie van Rooyen

When we talk about “sustainable design” in rural South Africa, the conversation often starts in the wrong place.

It starts with products.

A solar panel. A rain tank. A “green” material. A clever gadget. A shiny add-on.

And then, a year later, the battery is dead, the tank is cracked, the pump is stolen, the maintenance plan is missing, and the project becomes one more story people tell about something that arrived with promise and left with disappointment.

The hard truth is this: sustainability is not a shopping list. It’s not a bolt-on. It’s not a certification badge you can hang on a wall.

In rural communities—where budgets are tight, distances are long, municipal systems are under strain, and climate extremes are becoming the new normal—sustainability is something far more grounded: good design. The kind of design that works with the land, fits the climate, respects daily routines, and can be maintained with local skills and local parts.

But here’s the catch: good design only becomes “sustainable” when it works at more than one scale at once.

A comfortable home means little if the route to school is unsafe and baking hot. A water tank becomes a problem if overflow erodes footpaths and road edges. A solar system can’t uplift a community if it powers a TV while the clinic’s fridge and the borehole pump still fail when the grid drops.

Everything is interlinked. Which means the real work of sustainable design is not to make a building greener—it is to create synergy between the big structure of the community and the small details of everyday life.

That’s not a new idea. In 1977, architect Christopher Alexander and his colleagues published A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, arguing that places that truly work—places that feel alive—emerge from recurring, time-tested relationships between people, buildings, and nature. These “patterns” are not style. They are practical solutions that can be repeated, adapted, and combined, from the scale of a region down to the thickness of a wall. The magic is coherence: when the small parts strengthen the whole, and the whole supports the small parts.

In rural South Africa, we need that kind of thinking more than ever. Not because we’re chasing a romantic ideal of “living architecture,” but because rural settlements are already doing systems-design every day—just informally, through survival: where to walk, where to gather, where to find shade, where water pools after rain, which paths are safest after dark, which homes are bearable in summer.

The opportunity is to turn that lived knowledge into deliberate design: not just greener buildings, but settlements that function like ecosystems—catching and holding water, tempering heat, protecting infrastructure, making movement safe, and creating the spatial conditions for local economies to thrive.

Start where life starts: water

If there is one thread that ties rural sustainability together, it’s water. Water is comfort, hygiene, food, dignity, and time. It’s the difference between children arriving at school ready to learn or exhausted before the day begins. It’s also the force that can quietly destroy a settlement when it’s ignored.

Too many places are planned as if water is simply delivered—and stormwater is simply drained away. But South African work on Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) offers a more useful frame: design settlements so that water is managed as a cycle, embedded in the landscape, not treated as a linear service.

Now imagine what that means on the ground.

It means reading the land before drawing lines. Knowing where water wants to move in a storm. Protecting natural drainage lines rather than building across them. Using small, distributed landscape interventions—swales, contour berms, infiltration trenches, planted basins—not as decorative landscaping but as quiet infrastructure that keeps roads intact and yards usable.

And it means linking the household to the settlement.

A rain tank is helpful. But the bigger question is always: where does the overflow go? When the answer is “into a designed soakaway, a planted swale, a gentle infiltration route,” then the small household intervention strengthens the larger community system. When the answer is “down the path, into the road, into the neighbour’s yard,” then the green add-on becomes a slow disaster.

This is what synergy looks like: the roof and the yard become part of the catchment; the catchment becomes part of the settlement; the settlement becomes part of the landscape.

Comfort is not a luxury; it’s infrastructure

The second thread is comfort—thermal comfort, indoor air, and the everyday experience of living in a place. In rural communities, comfort is not about “nice-to-have” aesthetics. It’s about health and function. A home that traps heat, a classroom that stifles, a clinic that can’t maintain stable conditions—these are not design shortcomings, they are social burdens.

Passive design is the most democratic sustainability tool we have. Orientation, shade, cross-ventilation, insulated ceilings, controlled openings, verandas that cut the sun—these choices lower costs and improve wellbeing without needing a complex system to maintain.

And the climate case is getting stronger. Research on affordable housing performance in South Africa under warming conditions highlights a sobering reality: strategies like heavy masonry and natural ventilation help, but may become insufficient if climate warming continues and broader housing and energy poverty challenges aren’t addressed. In other words, we can’t treat comfort as an afterthought—it is foundational, and it’s increasingly urgent.

But once again, comfort doesn’t stop at the doorstep.

A well-designed home is undermined if the settlement forces people into long, exposed walks under harsh sun. That’s why the “micro” and “macro” have to collaborate: building comfort should be reinforced by shaded movement routes, street trees, courtyards, windbreak planting, and public thresholds that create cool, usable outdoor space.

In a hot climate, the public realm is not optional—it’s the circulation system of daily life.

Movement is economy (and safety)

In many rural settlements, transport is the hidden tax. The cost of getting to a clinic, a school, a market, or a job opportunity—measured in money, time, and risk—can quietly erode household stability.

Sustainable design at the macro scale asks a simple question: are daily needs arranged so that people can reach them safely and affordably? If the settlement has a clear “daily spine”—routes that people naturally use—then design can strengthen that spine: shade, lighting in key places, clear sightlines, and small public spaces that make movement feel safe and social rather than threatening.

This is one of the most overlooked forms of “green” design because it doesn’t look like a gadget. But it changes everything: school attendance, clinic access, social cohesion, and the viability of local trade.

And it aligns directly with Alexander’s pattern logic: patterns are not isolated objects; they are relationships that shape behaviour. A shaded threshold outside a public building is not a nice design detail—it becomes a waiting space, a trading edge, a place where neighbours see each other, where information spreads, where community becomes visible. That is how places gain life.

Energy that protects the essentials

Energy conversations often default to household-level upgrades, but in rural communities the uplift is greatest when energy is treated as a resilience strategy for critical services.

Ask people what hurts most during outages and instability and you’ll hear a consistent list: water pumping stops, clinic refrigeration fails, communications drop, safety lighting disappears, school operations suffer.

So the sustainable design question isn’t “how many panels can we install?” It’s: what must not fail—and how do we design for that first?

This is where “resilience hubs” become powerful: clinics, water infrastructure, and key public nodes supported by generation, storage, and—crucially—demand reduction. Efficient lighting, sensible load management, and well-designed buildings reduce the storage needed and make the system more affordable.

But there is a non-negotiable rule: maintainability is a design requirement. If a system needs specialist parts and specialist skills that can’t be found locally, it will fail. Designing for appropriate complexity—standard components, local spares, clear ownership, and training—turns energy into a long-term community asset rather than a short-lived donation.

Nature is not decoration; it’s the operating system

All of this loops back to one overlooked truth: in rural settings, nature is not a backdrop. It is the core infrastructure.

Trees are cooling machines. Healthy soils are water storage. Wetlands are flood buffers and filters. Indigenous vegetation stabilises slopes and reduces erosion. Productive planting supports nutrition and micro-enterprise. A well-placed windbreak can change the comfort of an entire cluster of homes.

The WSUD approach effectively formalises this idea for water: the landscape itself can do hydraulic work when we design with it rather than against it.

And once you start thinking like that, “sustainability” stops being a marketing term. It becomes a practical discipline: treat natural systems as functional systems, then make built systems cooperate with them.

The synergy test: does the small strengthen the whole?

Here’s a useful way to separate real sustainability from green theatre.

For every intervention—big or small—ask: does this strengthen the wider system it sits inside?

If you add rain tanks, do you also shape yards and paths to absorb and slow runoff? If you improve housing comfort, do you also create shaded routes and dignified public thresholds so outdoor life works too? If you add solar, do you prioritise clinic cold chains, water pumping, and safety lighting, with a plan for maintenance? If you plant trees, is there stewardship, protection, and water planning for the first two years?

If the answer is yes, you’re building a living system. If the answer is no, you may still be “going green,” but you are not building resilience—and you are not uplifting communities.

This is the heart of the pattern language mindset: don’t chase isolated solutions. Build coherent relationships that can be repeated, adapted, and maintained.

A more honest definition of sustainability

In the rural South African context, sustainability is not an aesthetic. It is not a premium product layer. It is dignity that lasts.

It looks like settlements shaped by water instead of destroyed by it. Homes that are comfortable without expensive machines. Safe, shaded routes that make daily life easier. Clinics and water systems that keep working when conditions are hard. Nature that cools, protects, feeds, and stabilises.

Most of all, it looks like design that understands a simple truth: communities are not collections of buildings. They are interlinked systems—social, ecological, and infrastructural—woven together by everyday movement and everyday needs.

When macro structure and micro detail work in harmony, sustainability becomes what it was always meant to be: not a green add-on, but good design practices that create a viable future.

References

• Alexander, C., Ishikawa, S., Silverstein, M., et al. (1977). A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction. Oxford University Press.

• Armitage, N., Fisher-Jeffes, L., Carden, K., Winter, K., & Naidoo, V. (2014). Water Sensitive Urban Design (WSUD) for South Africa: Framework and Guidelines (WRC Report TT 588/14). Water Research Commission.

• Water Research Commission. (2015). Water Sensitive Urban Design: Securing Water in Urban Settlements (Lesson Series).

• Bradley, R. (2023). Vulnerability of Affordable Housing to Global Warming in South Africa: Case Study of a Masonry House in Johannesburg. Buildings, 13(6), 1494.