The Ger for the 21st Century: Air Pollution and Coal in the Ger-Districts of Mongolia

Join Mark Gardner, William Braham, and Achilles Kallergis for a conversation about the Ger for the 21st century that will focus on William’s work with the Center for Environmental Building + Design (CEBD) at the University of Pennsylvania he has been developing for the last 4 years.

Starting in 2017, the Center for Environmental Building + Design at Penn began working with the Mongolian non-profit GerHub to audit the comfort and energy use of a selection of buildings in the ger district of Ulaanbaatar and a ger that was built in Philadelphia. Ger are the traditional, tent-like dwellings of the Mongolian herder nomads (called Yurts in Russian), and roughly 60% of the residents of the capital city live there in a combination of ger and self-built rigid frame houses.

The results of that year successfully demonstrated that improved ger could be heated with electricity for lower cost than with coal and wood. Those improvements were applied to 200 ger the following year in Bayankhongor, a regional city, using an affordable package of improvements developed by a team at the Mongolian University of Science and Technology.