In 2011, Siddharth Menon visited Kandbari, a village in the foothills of the Himalayan mountains in Northern India. As he was returning home from work at a construction site, he noticed rows of uninhabited mud houses.
“Green algae ran riot over their facades. Roof tiles lay broken, presumably the work of mischievous monkeys,” Menon wrote in an Antipode journal article last year.
There was a reason these “traditional” houses were abandoned. The people of the Himalayas were turning toward industrial, “modern” materials like cement and concrete over the locally sourced mud, bamboo and wood they had been using for generations. Traditional practices were transforming, and Menon wanted to chart the reasons for these deeper shifts and why they were happening so fast.
Menon became a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography in 2018 after working as an architect for various grassroots organizations in rural India. For years following his undergraduate degree, he worked to build community centers in India using traditional building practices and materials. All the while, his interest in the shifting of materials grew.
“It was during that practice that I decided I wanted to understand some of the broader structural processes through which built environments in the Global South are changing so rapidly,” Menon says.
The Global South is a broad term used in both popular and academic discourse to refer to places in the world facing uneven development, especially those in Africa, Asia and Latin America. These are places that have grappled with the aftereffects of colonialism and the long legacies of European powers plundering their natural resources.
In the United States, we hardly think about concrete (or cement, its dry powdered form), but this material has survived long after the European powers retreated from their colonies. In India, especially, concrete has become the material symbol of rapid change, urbanization and modernization.
Concrete has a long history of human usage. “A few thousand years ago, you had the Roman Empire using concrete for the Coliseum and all these grand infrastructures,” Menon says. “But modern cement or concrete comes to many parts of the Global South through colonialism. For India, it was through British colonial rule.”
In the late 19th century, British military engineers imported a modern variant called “Portland cement” into India, using it to construct large colonial infrastructures, including railways and ports used to extract resources from the land. And as European development accelerated, concrete became associated with the modern aesthetic.
“Modernist architects from the United States and Europe came to the Global South to build these new modern cities, with buildings like the capital complex in Chandigarh, India and the National Parliament House in Dhaka, Bangladesh,” Menon says. “These structures would become symbols of modernity for spaces coming out of colonialism and of trying to establish themselves and their identity.”
Even decades after India’s independence from British rule in 1947, the language of modernity persists through concrete, which has its reasons for being so widely used.
“It’s an excellent material. It’s waterproof. You can build large infrastructures,” Menon says.
But concrete also has a huge environmental footprint. Concrete is made from limestone quarried from mines. Once the rock is quarried, it needs to be processed using tremendous quantities of carbon emissions just to get a single bag of cement. And to turn that cement into concrete, you need water, stone and lots of sand.
Meanwhile, back in the Kandbari village in Northern India, concrete and modernity were beginning to replace traditional mud. Menon interviewed household members, probing how they perceived concrete and asking them, among other things: Why did they build cement houses?
One man said his wife wanted a cement house. In another case, a man’s daughter-in-law refused to live in a mud house. Menon then asked the same question directly to female household members.
“That’s when things started becoming clear,” Menon says.
Traditional mud houses were generally built by men. But men were not usually involved in maintaining them.
“Mud houses are really susceptible to moisture and weathering. They’re required to be maintained almost on an everyday basis,” Menon says. “And that labor of maintenance fell on the shoulders of women.”
Women of the household got up before the men to collect mud for plastering the cracks on the walls and floors. But cement houses were waterproof and strong. They didn’t crack as easily as mud houses did.
“Suddenly, just by changing the material from mud to cement, you negated the whole need for everyday maintenance labor,” Menon says.
It also changed lifestyles. It gave families more time, which some women spent to look after their parents or children. Some women were able to look for jobs in the broader market for the first time.
“Just a small change in materiality — the material of the house — had such a different impact on households,” Menon says.
But while concrete had supposedly upended some traditional gender roles, it also ran into its limitations — larger social, political and economic forces. And as concrete restructures the lives of ordinary families in India, its expansion is also populating the rest of the world with concrete jungles.
According to Menon, “every little surface is touched by concrete.” He says it’s the most used material on earth after water. And, according to the United Nations, an additional 2 billion people will move to cities in rapidly growing regions of the Global South by 2050. By then, the rapid growth in population will inevitably mean that most cities will be dominated by concrete buildings, highways and various infrastructures. This also spells trouble for the environment.
“Cement and concrete are some of the biggest culprits of global climate change just because of the sheer environmental cost of converting limestone rocks into the final bag of cement,” Menon says.
Concrete also doesn’t decompose back into the environment once it deteriorates after its 50- to 100-year-lifespan. And once concrete buildings are demolished, they simply end up as landfill. Even as it’s been used for the last 2,000 years, Menon describes how the scale, intensity and carelessness with which we’ve used it globally is bringing concrete closer to its replacement.
Menon says cement companies are beginning to “greenwash” cement — making it out of recyclable materials or using less carbon emissions to produce it. But still, the pace of development will turn the question of what materials to use into where we should extract them.
That, for Menon, is where concrete becomes more than just a material we use to construct our cities and homes. It’s been used for much of human history. But times have also changed. Concrete has increasingly reflected the hopes of national prosperity while also unveiling the structures of the lives it houses.