True, to an extent. But considering that some people still live in unkempt shacks, there is some room for improvement.
Mass producing the dome parts seem like a nice proposition. Might not even be for housing at first but as an addon for a existing house. Say you wanted to clear your garage and store your stuff somewhere else in the property. Maybe for government-sponsored housing programs.
Or, I don't know, Africa? There are places where shelter is more important than the land.
I know that a lot of the "unkempt shacks" you see in India are like that because they are on illegally squatted land, and if they build a more permanent-looking structure they will be forcibly removed. If you look from above you can see many with TV satellite dishes.
In that case, this kind of dome is easily demountable, and offers a lot more protection from the elements than a shack. On the downside, that would also make it easy for people to steal your walls.
It's not about making the dome easy to take down -- it has to look like a dilapidated temporary installation. Perhaps if you covered it with cardboard and corrugated steel it would be allowed to remain.
Africa would be an awesome idea, but you'd have to do a lot of work with the locals to get them to see this as a viable shelter.
I worked on a project that tried to bring new types of homes to Haiti. This was a HUGE problem because if the locals don't like it (no matter how cool) your idea won't take off.
The fact is that most Haitians thought that wood and corrugated metal were what a "house" was (assuming you couldn't afford a concrete home).
This isn't only African's. You could look at forward swept wings in a similar manner (I'm oversimplifying some of the technical difficulties there though).
i remember someone who did a lot of aid work in africa said something similar - various ngo's would come to a village and build stuff and the locals weren't interested - have heard similar in the amazon.
for instance someone had built communal latrines which were unused.
his starting point was asking the villagers what they wanted to do
they said "the chiefs house is a mess" - so they worked on that first, then built individual latrines for each house and made other improvements - they were able to do this by finding out what the locals wanted and working on that, if he'd just gone and built a bunch of stuff that he wanted to he would have been much less successful.
Mass producing the dome parts seem like a nice proposition. Might not even be for housing at first but as an addon for a existing house. Say you wanted to clear your garage and store your stuff somewhere else in the property. Maybe for government-sponsored housing programs.
Or, I don't know, Africa? There are places where shelter is more important than the land.