Designer Stephen Lamb describes Cape Town, his home base in South Africa, as the perfect tale of two cities. Although the bustling, beach location catches the eye for its natural beauty - much like South Africa's other urban zones - it continues to face a massive housing problem.

In the city's densely populated informal settlements, corrugated tin shacks offer a cheap, quick alternative to real housing.

As residents wait for brick-and-mortar homes that may never come, Lamb asks a few basic questions: How do we keep these spaces safe and dignified? From a food security perspective, how do we keep these growing populations fed?

Through the Green Shack project, Lamb and his team have developed a design to make shacks not only safer, but also to turn them into independent units of fresh, organic vegetable production.

"Within this space of waiting, we have an ever-expanding and recently dramatically expanding informal settlement problem where people face three things in particular, the three ‘F’s – food, fire and flooding," he tells www.freshfruitportal.com.

"More specifically the food part revolves around the need to secure accessible, cost-efficient, liberating sources of free and fresh, organic vegetables. People living in shacks do not have many options when it comes to fresh produce and the ability to grow it in simple and meaningful ways."

To address ongoing shack concerns, the project seeks to implement a number of simple, lost-cost techniques: elevated floors to prevent flooding, ventilation to prevent fires and vertical gardening to provide food.

Though space in informal settlements may be limited, Lamb says the basic resources to create food remain.

"In South Africa, the sun shines as brightly on all of the wealthy white areas as is does on all of the poor, impoverished areas. Plants want to grow. But how do you connect the dots and grow them in areas of need?" he says.

With gardens mounted on the shack's sunniest walls, residents would have the capability to grow high-value, high-demand foods.

"The food that we tend to grow is leafy vegetables primarily, micro greens and your high value foods. We even have production of edible, organic mushrooms. With mushrooms, it’s not so much that we think people in informal settlements want to eat mushrooms but because of the economic power that mushrooms hold," he says.

As foods that grows year round, mushrooms and leafy vegetables provide both a nutrition source and an economic option.

"Food security is not just about what you can put in your stomach but also about the opportunity of choice to sell it. If you can sell mushrooms and make a decent return on investment, you’ve got choice. It offers choice through the revenue it can provide."

Earlier in the year, Lamb and artist Andrew Lord built a prototype of this food-producing shack for Design Indaba in Cape Town. The project has garnered the attention of NGOs, the design community and businesses like Pick n Pay.

Until now, however, Lamb says the project still lacks the appropriate government support to truly get off the ground.

"We’ve formally presented the fire, food and flooding proposal to government 24 times. We’ve met the mayor, the premier. We’ve done this at a higher level with the Department of Housing, the Department of Safety and Security," he says.

"We’ve got endorsement from each of these formal meetings, but 11 months down the line, we’ve been entirely unsuccessful in persuading them to pilot one in the city with official government backing."

With Cape Town declared World Design Capital 2014, Lamb emphasizes the current political importance of addressing informal housing needs.

"We believe food, fire and flooding are the most relevant design challenges our city has but at the same time the government isn’t endorsing this conversation in any meaningful way," he says

Although housing has been a public priority for South Africa's post-apartheid government, not much has improved for the nation's informal settlers. In July, presidential minister Trevor Manuel announced that the same number of people lived in informal housing as they had in 1994.

"What this means is that people who migrate to the cities find city life alienating in all forms," Manuel said in news24.com.

"Even people who hold formal jobs battle to live in our cities. The poor tend to live on marginal land, in unplanned areas that are consequently poorly serviced; distances are huge and transport costs expensive."

Lamb highlights the importance of turning housing expectations into real, politically-supported plans.

"There are many lectures and seminars going on but they aren’t being connected in any meaningful way. Our frustration is that we’re caught in the doldrums of talking and we want to stop the madness of talking. Change is a verb. It’s a doing word," he says.

www.freshfruitportal.com