by Amy Willard-Cross

If the tallest building in the world hasn’t toppled in the wind, it’s because of Tracy Kijewski-Correa, an engineer who consulted on the sky-touching Al Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai. At the same time, she is working on some of the lowest building forms in the world—the slum-type dwelling of the extreme poor.

Kijewski-Correa's life has always had those contrasts; she explains that growing up Chicago’s “slums” makes her sensitive to the needs of those who are economically disadvantaged or who don’t have the same opportunities. From the South Side she’d stare up a beautiful skyscrapers dreaming, "How do you do that?"

An engineer and professor at the University of Notre Dame, Kijewski-Correa is trying to solve the world’s shelter problem. She started an organization called Engineering2Empower (E2E) to reinvent permanent housing in Haiti. The effort is not just about tech know-how -- she's also pioneering a new business model.

Her ambition doesn’t stop in Haiti; she also started a project to to fix the problem worldwide. The unprecedented crowd-sourcing project, called Shelter for All, is working to reinvent shelter for the billions of slum-dwellers worldwide.

After the 2010 Haitian earthquake, medical teams at Notre Dame said they were asked by Haitians to send for engineers, stat. So Kijewski-Correa flew down with colleagues to help with reconnaissance -- she had done similar research after the Indian Ocean Tsunami. Kijewski-Correa describes the horror of seeing rubble with bodies sticking out or cremated in situ. “We decided to continue our efforts to help solving problems at the bottom of the economic pyramid which were being neglected in a lot of the reconstruction plans," she said. "What it would cost these families to build safely that was in their price point economically was something they couldn’t do without foreign aid."

Flying home with colleague Alexandros Taflanidis, Kijewski-Correa realized they had to do something and started sketching. So began E2E to build strong homes that can withstand earthquakes or hurricanes. The system allows building in stages, transforming temporary shelter to permanent homes. E2E will use local materials, including agricultural waste in an innovative process to make beams, columns, and wall panels.

E2E is not about movie stars having a photo-op with hammer in hand. To create local jobs and keep costs down, Haitians themselves will make and sell the components and do the construction. They’re working on business models to franchise depots owned and run locally, which will make, sell and build the new houses. E2E plans to start by spring 2012.

Shelter for All

Kijewski-Correa's work in Haiti led her to think about the huge global problem of slums. (One in seven people around the world lives in substandard housing.) “It’s one of the challenging problems to solve, but not a lot of people are spending time solving it because there’s not a lot of glamour in it," Kijewski-Correa says. Entrepreneurs don’t jump at fixing this problem either since there’s no money in it: such shelters would have to be sold “dirt cheap to be sustainable without foreign aid." With 1 billion people living in slums, Kijewski-Correa calls the problem a ticking time bomb, with many people at risk.

Shelter for All is an attempt to use the wisdom of crowds to address this grand challenge The goal is “to tap our collective conscious and demonstrate that everyday citizens could get together to solve a problem that has technical dimensions," Kijewski-Correa says, citing the example of a Russian women in a village who came up with a winning ad campaign. The model has also worked well for Linux and Wikipedia.

Kijewski-Correa is optimistic about citizen engineers coming up with ideas. She's already called upon the public in the Haiti project. Volunteers who wanted to do something beyond check-writing classified endless photos to record what went wrong; the non-experts had an accuracy rating of 80%.

The Shelter for All competition invites everyone, offers $15,000 in prize money, and closes January 15. The winning solution will have to be sustainable, made locally. Kijewski-Correa says, “We want to do it without foreign aid. That doesn’t build opportunity or empower people.”

Ultimately, she hopes that Shelter for All spins off from Notre Dame and becomes a non-profit that helps seed local for-profit businesses around the world, similar to Partners In Health.

“Because I’m at Notre Dame, which is a Catholic school, we talk about using our talents and our efforts to address the poorest of the poor," Kijewski-Correa says. She adds that engineers often feel unable to advance social justice yet: “This opportunity to marry my technical knowledge passion and engineering to a cause that resonates with my Catholic heritage and the mission of this university is a perfect marriage that resonates with my core beliefs about having preferential options for the poor.”

To enter the competition or learn more go to Shelters for All

Images via the University of Notre Dame