Community Workshops: An Interactive Approach for Rural Housing Design through Peoples’ Participation

Abstract

Community workshop can be defined as an event organized to bring a group of people together to seek their opinions, extract their knowledge, and to solve the problems in a collaborative and creative environment. Peoples’ participation in such workshops can improve the built environment. The research therefore focuses on enhancing the role of community workshops to strengthen the bondage among the different actors in the community housing design. To gain an insight into the designing of such workshops and their implementation for suitability with the community, a village in India was selected as a case for study and application. The socio-cultural, economic and the physical study of the selected village, different types of interactive workshops were outlined. These were mainly based on the skills, experience and knowledge of the villagers. The author of the paper, being an architect by profession tried to keep her influence to the minimum on the overall decision making process so that the outcomes derived would be more community responsive than architect influenced. During the workshops, the author was able to conclude that the workshops are the simplest and the easiest way of involving people to think for themselves. These can be made innovative to target the objectives of the architects without his/ her influential involvement. Age, gender, education, skills, exposure, culture, creativity and many other issues related to the villagers need a thorough study before framing these participatory activities. One of the most important lessons is that these workshops should be kept flexible for the on- site changes. Finally, it can be said that, ‘The role of architect in such workshops is situation specific and cannot be generalized’. Keywords: community workshops, peoples’ participation, built environment, role of architects