For over 40 years, the relentlessly sunny city of Dubai has expanded and densified at a dizzying rate. Almost constant construction is evidenced in the building sites that crop up across urban space, defining new territories for development. Today, Dubai’s airports and port are among the world’s busiest—gateways for those en route to other destinations, or, increasingly, arriving to settle. 

Building at such a scale and pace has, until now, gone hand in hand with a reliance on Portland cement—the most common of its type globally. Cheap and easy to work with, cement has been universally adopted in building. However, the carbon emissions resulting from its production make cement one of the most significant contributors to carbon emissions globally. Thus, the construction industry is trapped in an unsustainable operation predicated on a material that significantly contributes to the climate crisis. As such, today’s architects and urbanists are faced with the challenge of finding a sustainable alternative to standard building practices and their underlying business models. We are exploring this question at waiwai, our architectural design studio in Dubai. 

Rather than seeking a one-size-fits-all solution or focusing on aesthetics, we are looking to climate efficacy and material flow analysis for a way forward. Rooted in the local environment, vernacular architecture is by definition sensitive to local conditions, both cultural and climatic. We in Dubai have much to gain by looking through the layers of our city’s recent urban growth in search of the natural environment’s lessons. 

Those unfamiliar with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) often think of it as an exclusively desert landscape. However, the country is home to vibrant coastal and continental wetland ecosystems that host various aquatic, plant and animal life forms. These wetland environments are highly effective natural carbon sinks whose absorption of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is even more important given the elevated emissions resulting from contemporary patterns of urban life in the UAE. For example, to meet the needs of its growing population, the UAE has become one of the world’s leaders in desalination. However, desalination at this scale results in a high volume of wastewater brine. Released into the Gulf, the wastewater’s high salinity traps heat and increases the water temperature, destroying corals and other marine life, including even the brine shrimp. 

Protecting the UAE’s wetland habitats and their function as carbon sinks is more crucial than ever. But in addition to their more obvious carbon absorption function, these wetlands—which are also home to sabkhas, or salt flats made up of crystalline mineral formations—could also help point the way to a carbon-friendly vernacular architecture. Elsewhere in the Middle East, there are examples of salt used in vernacular architecture. Most notably, the western Egyptian oasis town of Siwa is constructed from karshif—a salt, mud and sand compound. Building with naturally occurring local materials offers a vital alternative to the relentless default of building with glass, steel and Portland cement—a mode of construction that characterises Dubai’s rapid growth, as well as that of other cities worldwide. 

All of this said, it is impossible to limit our cities’ construction to the scale of a town like Siwa. Nor can we take the naturally occurring sabkhas (coastal flats rich in clays, evaporites and salts) of the UAE as building material, since the extraction methodology would destroy the wetland ecosystem. But we can use these examples from the natural and built environments as a source of inspiration to guide a future way of building that draws on the lessons of the past—a future vernacular, as it were. Taking this inspiration, and shifting our thinking from an extractive to a circular economy, we can devise new systems that use the industrial waste produced by our cities as the materials for a future vernacular. 

It is in this spirit that waiwai has developed a series of cement prototypes that use salt rather than Portland clinker (the production of which is what emits so much carbon) as a binding agent. Salt taken from wastewater brine that is a by-product of industrial-scale desalination in the UAE has proven to be a viable element in construction. Derived directly from the local environment, wastewater brine is a reliable source of a binding material whose use in turn addresses an urgent if localised aspect of the climate crisis: that is, the damaging release of brine into the UAE’s wetlands. While building with salt-based cement is a solution that will only work in some contexts, the thinking behind it offers a model for responding to the challenges of sustainability. As is the case with all vernaculars, this one works because of the specific conditions—of urbanism, environment and history—embedded in this place at this time.

To address our present predicament, we should not seek a universal agenda or solution that will apply to all places. Such thinking—that certain materials and ways of building can be applied regardless of context—underpinned modernism in architecture, and led us down the path of environmental degradation and climate disaster. Each city must find its vocabulary.