The Village Needs Attention: Collaborative and Participatory Design Studio Process in Teaching Rural Architecture

Looking at the village through the lens of ‘romanticism’ often frames a village with thatch-roofed courtyard-centered houses, situated within a green-blue landscape. The people are not placed in this picturesque view, and their day-to-day life activities are ignored. The rural-to-urban migration, changing landscape and profession due to climate change, loss of agricultural land, etc. need careful attention. Because of the rapid growth of urbanization and associated infrastructure, every year Bangladesh loses 0.3% of its cultivated land, where the country is still mostly agrarian. Again, the short-sighted yet populist political statement- ‘Village will be the city’, looks for immediate ‘action’ leaving the ‘romanticism’. Frustratingly, rural planning and architecture are not well placed in the curriculum of Architecture. Professionals who will shape the future of the built environment, if unaware of a context, can’t act in an informed way. Four residential workshops were conducted in the Department of Architecture, DIU during the 2018-2021 time period, under an initiative titled ‘Grammo’, by the author. The residential workshop tried to look at the architecture of the village within a broad spectrum of socio-cultural and environmental events. Therefore, the participation of local stakeholders as well as the social hub was carefully included. The outcome of these workshops searched for need-based project ideas, which are then practiced either as class projects or documented digitally. These project proposals/ documents were displayed in those villages for user feedback. The paper aims at sharing the participatory process and outlining a participatory framework so that a new method of teaching rural architecture can be formulated in the design discipline.