DoA Symposium: Building / Community in the Tropics and Beyond
13.30–15.00 Institutions
Huhana Smith, Massey University, New Zealand
Gauri Bharat, Anant National University, India
Moderated by Robin Hartanto Honggare, NUS
Sustaining architectural communities depends not only on design but on institutional practices of governance, funding, care, and use, and practices that mediate knowledge production. Spatial interventions may well falter without formal stewardship, yet institutionalisation might also potentially constrain participation. This session examines how such tensions might be reconciled or negotiated. It asks how community initiatives might stabilise into operating models, and how architecture’s institutional structures can strive to remain adaptive, inclusive, and recognise modes of co-creation.
Me Whakaoreore Tātou: Let’s Mobilise Communities as One via Mapping Technologies, Art, Design, Nature and Culture.
Huhana Smith, Massey University, New Zealand
An ecologically and culturally ambitious series of projects over the last 25 years have been underway in Kuku, Horowhenua. Each has used Mātauranga Māori-led approaches, ancestral knowledge of place and Māori research methodologies of whakapapa, hīkoi and korero tuku iho to underpin the many actions required for enhancing water and biodiversity health, within agriculturally modified landscapes. More recently GIS-photogrammetry modelling, geo-design, EKOS carbon accounting and auditing experts coalesced their skills to visualise future farm land-use transition options for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), for this revered ancestral landscape. Additionally, multifunctional land-use transition strategies, which reduce emissions and compound benefits have been envisaged to enhance ecosystem values and long-term economic sustainability. These transition strategies or wholistic approaches aim to devise financial projections for proposed new income streams that benefit the iwi and hapū shareholders. In embedding all our research from a culturally grounded, real-world, practical and with ‘do-able’ outcomes, these envisaged natural solutions to climate change have helped our community to see, understand and articulate a clear adaptive pathway forward that returns the natural environment/Te Taiao and increases the environmental resilience of the coastal farm.
Tales from a Kulhi: Exploring Streets and Solidarity, Communities and Care
Gauri Bharat, Anant National University, India
The kulhi is the street in Adivasi (indigenous) villages in eastern India. It is the morphological determinant of village form but also an important social institution. In this talk, I discuss the idea of the kulhi as a protective domain for the community, and practices such as floor plastering and the painting of murals as acts of community solidarity. With the passage of time, however, like any other society, Adivasis have transformed. The village landscape has taken on new inserts, from infrastructure such as water tanks to painted slogans and campaign posters. The kulhi today thus emerges as a palimpsest of historical form, cultural memory, and modern institutional practices. Drawing from epistemologies of care, I ask how such institutions that exist as strong community imaginaries but with minimal formal imprint and subtly transforming in time challenge the limits of the discipline of architecture.