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According to Future Cities Laboratories, steel is not irreplaceable. There’s a material alternative that grows in the tropical zone of our planet, an area that coincides closely with the developing world: bamboo. Bamboo belongs to the botanical family of grasses and is extremely resistant to tensile stress and is therefore one of nature’s most versatile products. This has to do with the way the grass evolved, adapting to natural forces like wind. In contrast to wood, the bamboo culm or haulm, which are botanical terms for the stem of a grass, is thin and hollow. This allows it to move with the wind, unlike a tree, which tries to simply withstand any natural forces it is exposed to. This adaptation for flexible movement required nature to come up with a very light but tension-resistant fiber in the bamboo culm which is able to bend in extreme ways without breaking. In its ability to withstand tensile forces, bamboo is superior to timber and even to reinforcement steel.