Environments by Design

Abstract

Using community participatory methods, this live practice-based research provides an opportunity to understand, explicate and share these largely unspoken, undocumented and often very local methods and networks of knowledge, that exist and are practiced by the communities living in rural Bangladesh, who are addressing the already damaged climate and its rapid changes.  

This paper reviews a community focused project in a remote village in Bangladesh, the Rajapur Women’s Literacy and Community Healthcare Centre or the Rajapur Centre. Exploring the role of a UK-based architect (myself), through an environmental lens, in the context of social, cultural and economic sustainability and insights from ethnographic fieldwork. 

The research provides a valuable addition to the ideas (that has been explored in other disciplines but not so much in architecture) that human, non-human and the climate are entangled with each other. The power of collective consciousness and local understanding of the context, leading to co-designing architectural responses to the changing climate, in the shifting landscape of Bangladesh.

One of the most significant consequences of participatory architectural method, is that this enabled the identification and communication of the kinds of existing architectural adaptations that address the issues of responding to the rapid changing climate of the riparian characteristics of Bangladesh. 

The research highlights the experimental practices that enables the participants to initiate improvised methods of local, specific, tactic immediately disappearing knowledge. These methods of participation aim to challenge and to expand the narrow range of possibilities that currently characterize approaches to the subject of architecture through participation. More specifically, investigates the process of drawing out local skills that facilitates an inclusive team, giving voice to all community members, that empowers the community. This research aims to demonstrate the value of co-design and collective design intelligence through local craft in addressing the challenges of the changing climate.