Are Yasmeen Lari’s "Zero Carbon, Zero Waste, Zero Donor" Bamboo Villages Working?

Yasmeen Lari reclines on the couch of her home office in Karachi and, after her assistant finagles with a television monitor, flips through a series of slides that propose a path to lift millions out of poverty without spending a penny. The onetime starchitect turned humanitarian and preservation worker announced in 2022 she was seeking funding to build a million bamboo homes for around $100 apiece, after Pakistan suffered its worst-ever floods. This year, she’s shifted her plan, deciding she’d still aim for that, but with a new price tag to outside funders: $0.

"I really believe that everyone wants to have a better life. But they don’t see how they can achieve it," Lari says. "We put faith in them. We said, ‘Look, you’ve got to do it yourself.’"

Lari, now 83, pivoted in the 2000s from designing hulking concrete landmarks for business magnates and oil companies to building low-cost, zero-carbon relief homes in disaster zones. She began using bamboo after stumbling upon it at a refugee camp in the northwestern Swat Valley and quickly discovered its remarkable resilience to earthquakes and floods. Since the 2022 floods, Lari and the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan, which she founded with her husband to preserve historic structures, have built 50,000 shelters in flood-affected communities. Now, she believes she can replace the need for outside funding by essentially designing a model for communities to do it themselves. If enough people gain the knowledge to build affordable, sustainable housing and infrastructure, while also creating financial opportunities through selling vegetables or terra-cotta tiles, she posits they can make a living teaching others to do the same. She has crafted a plan for villages to first achieve food security, then progress to access to clean water and education, flood-proof bamboo homes, and finally, a fully humming microeconomy.

I first met Lari when she was a guest lecturer at the University of Cambridge in 2023. Last November, I visited her in Karachi, the metropolis she’s called home for most of her professional life, before traveling to Pono, a village in the floodplains of Sindh’s Indus River which her foundation has rehabilitated after the 2022 floods.

Wherever she goes, Lari’s plans are usually met with disbelief; admiration expressed through raised eyebrows and befuddled gazes. As she waited for a meeting at Karachi’s exclusive colonial-era Sind Club, the wife of a pharmaceutical executive approached Lari to express her admiration and asked what she’s working on now. Lari launched into it: food, shelter, education, and clean water for a million households, all with no money raised. The admirer turned to me almost incredulously, as if she had misheard. Lari laughed, gesturing in my direction. "He’s about to see it for himself."

In the days before I visited Lari’s bamboo villages, she recalled what led her here. The devastation of Pakistan’s floods—$15 billion in economic losses, millions pushed below the poverty line, rapidly spreading waterborne diseases and skin infections, and more than 230,000 children still out of school, according to UNICEF—was most vicious in parts of the country already facing an ongoing social catastrophe. Wealth inequality in Pakistan is extreme, and nowhere more so than in the floodplains of the southeastern Sindh province, where peasant communities live as feudal subjects to powerful landowners whose land they till. Many tell stories of how, when the floods hit, water was diverted from profitable farmland and into the poorest communities. People gathered for weeks on roadsides, the only places that weren’t flooded.

"Suddenly, everything was washed away," Lari says. "There’s just nothing left, no fields, no greenery, no nothing. These people never had anything much in their lives, but whatever it was, it was all gone."