Community Architects Research Articles

Art of resistance: Art activism, experts, and housing security in Nang Loeng, Bangkok, Thailand

AbstractThe paper presents a case study of art activism in Nang Loeng, a historic neighbourhood in Bangkok, Thailand. Long recognised for its rich cultural heritage from food to architecture, Nang Loeng has established its name as a site of cultural tourism, drawing interest from tourists, artists, and professional experts. Like many neighbourhoods nearby, Nang Loeng today is being threatened by looming gentrification and eviction, as the inner city is transforming itself into a tourist destination. In particular, the upcoming underground construction has put their housing security under pressure. The paper first discusses the context of rail‐led urban transformation in historic Bangkok, fuelled by the discourse of transit‐oriented development. Then, it introduces Nang Loeng and their series of art‐based programmes. Disappointed by their failure to secure housing tenure from the landlord, Nang Loeng residents have turned to activism as a tool of resistance. Here, the paper pays particular attention to the role of community architects who creatively translates neighbourhood concerns into artistic forms. Through the case of Buffalo Field Festival, the paper illustrates how the community architects, artists and local residents collaboratively use Nang Loeng's cultural assets to make subtle political statements.

Identifikasi Ruang Manuver Menuju Resiliensi Komunitas di Masa Pandemi Covid-19

<p class="Abstract"><em>The pandemic of Covid-19 has hit Indonesia heavily, especially when it was confirmed infectious in early 2020. The government accelerated the immunization program and implemented numerous stimuli and regulations to reduce the effects. However, It didn't stop many people and communities from moving independently to cope with the impacts. An informal community partnership led by Arkom, a community architects’ institution, may be one of the pandemic's resilience efforts. Using a bottom-up and participatory strategy, Arkom has succeeded in building community resilience during the pandemic. The Covid 19 epidemic poses unique challenges from previous physical disasters. Seeing disaster as both a challenge and an opportunity, this study intends to describe Arkom's and its informal community alliances' resilience throughout the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. Safier's room of maneuver lens is used to dismantle scenarios with strategic, technical, organizational, and social components. The data is collected and analyzed using snowball procedures with community members and field facilitators. The study concludes that ARKOM and its community alliances could adapt to make a maneuver during the pandemic, and technology is one of the keys to maneuver success.</em></p>

How can community architects build socially resilient refugee camps? Lessons from the Office of Displaced Designers in Lesvos, Greece

PurposeThis paper explores social resilience through the lenses of migration. It specifically studies the role of community architects in building socially resilient refugee camps which are human settlements characterized by a transient and heterogeneous community with unique vulnerabilities. These settlements are managed through exceptional governance arrangements between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic humanitarian organizations.Design/methodology/approachEmpirical evidences are drawn from the Office of Displaced Designers (ODD), a design-focused creative integration organization active on Lesvos island. During one-month ethnographic research with ODD, empirical data were harvested through an extensive review of project archive materials including transcripts and audio files of interviews with project participants and collaborators conducted by ODD, architectural drawings and teaching materials, photo and video archives and administrative documents. The ethnographic research was complemented with semi-structured interviews with the founding members and former volunteers and partners of ODD; key site visits to the Moria Hotspot and the surrounding Olive Groves; as well as a desk study on European Union (EU) policies and legislative papers and legal information regarding the asylum seeker application procedure in Europe and Greece.FindingsReflecting on the potential and limitations of community architects in building socially resilient refugee camps, the paper concludes that in order for community architects to make long lasting improvements they must think holistically and design flexible structural solutions for the entire camp, leverage existing expertise within communities and assist other organizations through administrative, financial and design consultancy support. Community architects are also expected to take active roles in forming pro-equity governance structures and steering pro-resilient humanitarian trajectories by acting as mediators, lobbying their partners, advocating for inclusive practices and social spaces and documenting their projects to build an evidence base across practices and contexts and to strengthen their voice as a collective of community architects.Originality/valueThe role of community architects in building socially resilient human settlements in post-disaster place-based recovery processes has been widely discussed in the disaster scholarship. These studies have primarily emphasized permanent and in situ reconstruction efforts in disaster-affected areas. What remains limitedly discussed is the resilience-building potential of community architects in extraterritorial temporary human settlements characterized by displacement and temporality such as in refugee camps. In light of these observations, the aim of this paper is to push the boundaries of knowledge on post-crisis recovery by re-approaching the notion of social resilience from a migratory perspective and revealing the potential and limitations of community architects in fostering socially resilient refugee camps in new (national) territories.

Community architecture: the use of participatory design in the development of a community housing project in the Philippines

This study exhibits the use of participatory design in the development of a community housing project for the twelve family members of the Donnaville Homeowners Association in Barangay 177, Caloocan City, Philippines. All families have been living as informal settlers of which portions of it were considered unsafe due to recurrent flooding during heavy rains. The housing project study was part of a workshop initiated by members of the Community Architecture Network. In order to achieve this methodology, the community architects arranged workshops between members of the families. The members were divided into teams that worked separately and then collectively identify strategies in improving the design and layout of the housing unit according to the needs of each family. The teams identified various interventions in order to effectively reduce the cost of each new unit. Finally, through comprehensive discussions and exchanges between the members, the resulting layout and schematic design of the housing unit were achieved that was desirable to the families. By using participatory design in the development of a project, in this case, a community housing unit, user acceptance is therefore increased and rejection is reduced by the stakeholders.

Inoperative design

This paper presents a renewed critical reflection of the position and role of architecture in the current social turn of the practice. By thinking through a ‘resistant’ lens, taken from Giorgio Agamben’s spatial political aesthetics, this paper proposes that architectural design practice can reclaim its social agency. These reflections are grounded in the practice of community architecture as it has recently emerged out of the intensifying experience of informality and associated slum settlements in the rapidly growing cities of South-East Asia. Born out of the decade-long experience of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights, the Community Architects Network (CAN) was founded in 2010 and now connects practitioners in 19 countries. Based on a five-year-long engagement between the authors and CAN, the paper reflects on the critical possibilities of CAN’s practice, discussing propositions, ambitions, challenges, and opportunities, and the political potential of architecture. Additionally, it presents its limitations, questioning to what extent such practices can be considered a kind of ‘negligence’, that is, a resistance against the status quo as a way of effectively strengthening new subjectivities and voices.

Successes and failures of participation-in-design: Cases from Old Havana, Cuba

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba faced a crisis that forced it to change its housing approach. Self-help building programs began to supplant the construction of mass standardized housing estates. The Community Architect Program was developed to provide design advice to self-help builders, and it expanded exponentially within a decade. By the year 2000, all municipalities across Cuba had their own Community Architect Office. While the approach of the Community Architect Program has been hailed a breakthrough in the fields of planning and architecture, the particular case of Old Havana suggests that several obstacles prevent residents from benefiting from its services. The author identifies the strengths and limitations of the approach by looking at two home renovation projects in Old Havana and the perceptions of low-income residents on the work done by community architects. This research indicates that participatory design methods should be complemented by community-based initiatives that address other aspects of the housing development process, such as access to materials, construction, and construction management.

The Community Architect Program: Implementing participation-in-design to improve housing conditions in Cuba

The Community Architect Program was created in Cuba in 1994 to support self-help housing construction. Since the creation of the program, the community architects have used participatory techniques to provide technical advice to residents who wish to build, expand or renovate their homes. The article documents the codification and implementation of a new participatory design method, and its use by more than a thousand professional community architects on the island. The research looks at the institutional features characterizing the Community Architect Program and examines how these institutional features facilitate the practice of participatory design within the context of existing land use and building regulations. The paper analyzes the Cuban experience within the context of ongoing debates about participation in urban and housing processes.

The role of community architects in upgrading; reflecting on the experience in Asia

This paper describes the role of community architects in the upgrading programmes supported by the Asian Coalition for Community Action (ACCA), illustrated with examples that include a bamboo bridge project in Davao and a toilet project in Digos (the Philippines), a community-driven land allocation system in Gopalganj (Bangladesh), and upgrading developed by a savings group in a landless community in Hlaing Tar Yar township (Myanmar). Drawing on the authors’ experiences working as community architects, it also reflects on how to integrate social and physical change in communities in order to effect broader changes in society. The paper discusses the merits of community architecture and identifies what makes a good community architect, and describes the Community Architects Network (CAN) that has been formed and how it encourages architectural schools to incorporate knowledge and experience from community architects into their curriculum.

Facilitating community mapping and planning for citywide upgrading: the role of community architects

This paper examines the role that community architects and other professionals can play in helping urban poor communities to survey and map their living conditions and draw up comprehensive site plans for upgrading or relocation projects. The mapping process can lead not only to a physical map but also to dialogue and understanding between community residents about the place they call home and how it relates to the wider environment, which will feed into the planning process. In addition, all the communities within a city may join together to carry out citywide mapping of informal settlements, effectively putting themselves on the map and on the local authorities’ agenda. Throughout these stages of mapping, the role of the professional is to facilitate the processes technically, as well as to ask the right questions of the community members so as to encourage them towards a deeper understanding of their socio-political and physical living context, and to take the lead in developing solutions.

The Technical Training Resource Centre (TTRC): building community architects

This paper describes how the Technical Training Resource Centre (TTRC) was set up by a young trainee of the Orangi Pilot Project—Research and Training Institute (OPP—RTI) to support better quality housing and infrastructure provision in the kaatchi abadis (informal settlements) of Karachi. The centre’s work includes technical advice for constructing or extending houses and schools, training in construction for those with diplomas in civil engineering and architecture, and training for young people to undertake neighbourhood-level documentation and mapping (this is needed for planning upgrading and for negotiating with government authorities for infrastructure and tenure). The paper also discusses the difficulties that the TTRC faced, including generating sufficient funding to cover its costs.

Migration Pattern Process

AbstractWithin the international community architects are regularly typecast as exporters of predetermined solutions, rarely given the opportunity to respond appropriately, sensitively and effectively to specific and real emergencies. At the core of any impact are people like you and I; their welfare and successful healing creates a catalyst for the community to rebuild lives and esteem. Since 2007, Diploma Unit 7 at the Architectural Association in London, led by Simon Beames and Kenneth Fraser, has been researching the philosophical, social, political, economic and technical response to long‐term humanitarian relief and the resocialisation of displaced people and damaged communities in conditions of extreme hardship. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Combining Digital and Traditional Visualisation Techniques in Community-Based Planning and Design

Public participation is a key component in environmental planning and design. Yet too often, architects and planners are not equipped with effective tools and visualisation techniques to generate meaningful public input. Architects and planners are increasingly turning to computer technology; computer imaging can be used to support exploration of alternatives by enabling community members to visualise opportunities and scenarios before committing to a course of action (McClure, 1997). This paper explains how a Geographic Information System (GIS) and an artist played critical roles in a participatory planning process in Chicago's Pilsen neighbourhood. The GIS provided community leaders, planners, architects and designers with an interactive visualisation of the neighbourhood context. It also provided examples of design prototypes in relation to their geographic context. The artist, on the other hand, translated neighbourhood residents' ideas into quick sketches, merging their ideas and thoughts into a shared neighbourhood vision. Both of these elements – the GIS and the human artist – provided a means for residents to visualise past, present, and future neighbourhood conditions, enabling them to have a greater voice in the design of their neighbourhood. Our findings suggest that effective visualisation may be achieved through combining traditional and computerised visualisation tools, and that effective visualisation could assist in bridging the gap between professional designers and non-designers.

EC RESEARCH PROGRAMMES IN SUPPORT OF ENERGY-CONSCIOUS BUILDING DESIGN

This paper outlines the development of programmes which investigate architectural strategies for reducing energy use in buildings and which devise and implement means of introducing such strategies to European Community architects, and means of providing the technical information needed to design energy-efficient buildings. The experience is considered as a case study of a European effort to bring about technical change in architectural design and in the light of a widely-held perception that the integration of ‘scientific’ information in architectural design is problematic. The paper argues that programmes of design support are essential to advance the implementation of new approaches to energy in architectural design. In parallel with research in energy-efficient building it is necessary to advance our knowledge of certain real and perceived needs and desires of building designers, and it is appropriate that research directions should be influenced accordingly.