Ger Plug-In 3.0 / District Development Unit

Architects:District Development Unit

Area:100m²

Year:2023

Lead Architects:Joshau Bolchover (Director), Jersey Poon (Project Lead)

Category:Houses

Project Team:Minjmaa Enkhbat

Implementation Partner:Energy Efficient Design Build LLC (Dulguun Batkhishig and Erdembileg Nemekhbaatar)

Community Partner:Gerhub NGO (Uurtsaikh Sangi, Temuulen Enkhbat)

City:Ulaanbaatar

Country:Mongolia

Text description provided by the architects. Over 840,000 people live in the ger districts of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, sprawling districts of gers (traditional felt tents) and self-built houses. Most households use an average of 4.1 tons of coal or coke briquettes for heating each winter as temperatures drop below -30°C. There is no sewage or sanitation infrastructure: 95% of residents use pit latrines, 1% have access to piped water, and air pollution is extremely debilitating to health.

The Ger Plug-In 3.0 is an energy-efficient house that provides the ger with everything it does not have – access to sanitation, water, and electric heating. The Plug-In is designed to be built incrementally, residents can connect their existing ger to an infrastructural core at a low price, then extend with living and sleeping spaces when they have the financial capacity to do so.

The project addresses challenges facing Mongolians as they transition from a traditional nomadic to a sedentary urban lifestyle.  The Plug-in 3.0 harnesses the advantages of the ger as an affordable house and upgrades its performance to reduce energy use by 36% compared to local regulations and reduce CO2 emissions by 7.8 tons compared to a self-built house using coal.

Ger Plug-In 3.0 is the result of over 10 years of research and prototyping to design a scalable housing product that qualifies for green mortgages offered by national banks. The aim is to initiate a new building block for the city that maintains the cultural significance of the ger but can pivot development towards a more sustainable future.

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