In Bangladesh, rapid urbanization, rural-to-urban migration, and climate change converge to intensify the vulnerability of slum residents, particularly in regions like Sylhet. Slums are characterized by overcrowding, substandard housing, and limited access to essential services, leaving residents highly exposed to disease, poverty, and natural disasters. Climate change compounds these challenges through rising temperatures, shifting rainfall patterns, and increasingly frequent floods and cyclones that destroy precarious housing and disrupt livelihoods. Despite the urgency, many government-led relocation and upgrading initiatives have been ineffective, often failing to account for local needs and causing further social and economic disruption.

This research explores the urgent need for affordable, climate-resilient housing solutions tailored to Sylhet’s slum residents, with a focus on in-situ development that avoids forced relocation. It examines how housing can be designed to be both culturally appropriate and adaptable to the residents’ livelihoods, using locally available materials and construction techniques that enhance flood resilience. The study seeks to define affordability in this context, identify design features that improve climate resilience, and propose implementation strategies that maintain community stability during construction. By centering the specific needs and aspirations of slum residents, this research aims to inform practical, sustainable, and inclusive housing models that strengthen community resilience to climate change while addressing urban poverty in Bangladesh.

This master’s thesis explores how adaptive architectural strategies can help address recurring overspill flooding in the pre-urban areas of Sylhet, Bangladesh. These regions face growing challenges due to the combined effects of climate change and rapid, unplanned urban expansion. Based on in-depth fieldwork in Shonatola Village, the project identifies key vulnerabilities—including seasonal flooding, weak infrastructure, and rising land pressures—and proposes design solutions that support long-term resilience, affordability, and community self-reliance.

At the village level, the project introduces a phased development strategy that enables gradual transformation without displacing existing residents. A cross-subsidisation model ensures financial sustainability: higher-income households contribute more, helping to fund affordable housing for lower-income groups. Land security is managed through a Community Land Trust (CLT), which protects collective ownership and keeps housing affordable over time.

On the cluster scale, housing is arranged into three types tailored to different user groups: seasonal workers, low-income families, and mid-income households. These clusters are organised around shared courtyards and integrate existing ponds and drainage systems to manage water during floods. This layout promotes both social interaction and environmental resilience.

At the level of individual units, three modular housing types are designed using local materials and simple, low-tech construction methods. Features such as raised floors, flexible layouts, and bamboo wall panels help residents adapt their homes over time and stay safe during floods. Decentralised water systems—including rainwater harvesting, greywater treatment, and biogas production—further reduce reliance on external infrastructure and strengthen community.

The research combines literature review, case study analysis, fieldwork, and iterative design to develop a grounded and practical architectural response. By working across different scales and embedding local knowledge and participation into the process, Rising Grounds offers a replicable approach for flood-prone regions. The project demonstrates how architecture can move beyond short-term fixes to support lasting resilience and social equity in vulnerable communities.

This master thesis explores the housing challenges of the Lakkatura Tea Garden community in Sylhet, Bangladesh, one of the country’s most marginalized and segregated populations. The project responds to critical issues such as overcrowding, poor housing conditions, lack of privacy, and limited access to essential services. It recognizes the historical and socio-political dynamics of segregation in Bangladesh.

The proposed design improves living conditions by addressing these inequalities while preserving traditional spatial and social structures. It introduces a flexible and inclusive masterplan comprising various dwelling types, communal spaces and tourist accommodations. The design emphasizes adaptability to accommodate family growth and varied needs, while promoting social cohesion and a strong sense of belonging through carefully structured communal, shared, and private spaces.

Throughout the course of the graduation the student developed a mixed-use building complex for the Hawkers Market site in the city center of Sylhet, Bangladesh. Working within the scope of the Global Housing studio, the focus was set on creating a building composed primarily of dwellings that works in the challenging climate and socio-economic context of the location. Within this scope special emphasis was laid on researching and designing the implementation of the architectural concept of “incremental housing” within a high-rise structure.

The results of the research into similar projects and relevant case studies informed the design. This design integrates a conventional “ready-built” portion, catering to middle- to high-income residents, with a more unconventional open-volume section designed for lower-income residents. The latter consists of completely empty duplex units stacked vertically, forming a series of unoccupied building plots in the sky. The innovation lies in how the two parts of the building are interconnected, benefiting one another while maintaining completely segregated circulation paths for different user groups.

Housing for climate-displaced communities has long been limited to temporary solutions, often overlooking the long-term needs and realities of those affected. This thesis challenges that norm by proposing a new standard for permanent housing in the face of recurring displacement. Set in the flood-prone village of Shonatola, Bangladesh, the project engages directly with the lived experiences of vulnerable communities to offer a flexible, incremental housing model.
Designed to evolve with its residents, the proposal uses a hybrid structure that is centered around adaptability. Each home integrates pucca (permanent) and kutcha (temporary) components, allowing families to expand and modify their living spaces over time, based on need and resources.
More than just shelter, this project reimagines housing as a framework for long-term resilience—deeply rooted in local knowledge, environmentally responsive, and socially inclusive. It offers a path forward for rebuilding not just homes, but a community in the face of climate uncertainty.

Addis Ababa is experiencing a high rate of urbanization coupled with a decades-old housing crisis. This study problematizes the current housing problem not only in the frame of housing shortage but also as a ‘housing mismatch’, with the underlying dwelling typologies rooted in modernist design ideals not responding to context. These dwelling solutions, as seen in the recent condominium projects, do not fulfil the social and spatial requirements of dwellers. This problem calls for a thorough inquiry into tracing the roots of the ‘housing mismatch’. Since dweller-initiated housing transformations are a common phenomenon in most housing conditions in Addis Ababa, the study proceeded to analyze these transformations to understand the housing mismatch in its qualitative and spatial aspects. One of the reasons for dweller-initiated transformations is to finetune living habitats to cultural parameters. In line with this, transformations were observed during the test run of the fieldwork conducted on three households in 2020. Furthermore, the fieldwork revealed that dwellers used local conceptions of space such as the gibi, the gwaro and the gwada to explain the socio-spatial phenomena of transformations....

This thesis addresses the challenges of poverty and environmental sustainability in Tanguar Haor, Bangladesh, by developing an innovative amphibious rural design. The project integrates critical elements of vernacularity, modularity, resilience, and self-reliance to enhance the livability of this flood-prone region.

Tanguar Haor, characterized by its unique wetland ecosystem, faces significant issues related to seasonal flooding, which aggravates poverty and interferes with sustainable development. The proposed design uses local building traditions to ensure cultural relevance and acceptance. It employs modular construction techniques to facilitate easy assembly, maintenance, and scalability, making it adaptable to the dynamic environmental conditions of the haor.

A key design principle is resilience, which aims to withstand and quickly recover from flooding events. Amphibious structures ensure that buildings can float during high water levels and return to their original positions as waters recede, minimizing damage and displacement. The design also places a strong emphasis on community self-reliance, incorporating features such as rainwater harvesting and local material usage. These elements not only enhance community autonomy but also reduce dependency on external resources.

Through a holistic approach that integrates traditional knowledge with innovative design principles, this thesis illustrates how an amphibious rural design can offer a sustainable and practical solution to improve the living conditions in Tanguar Haor, addressing both poverty and environmental challenges. The findings highlight the importance of this interdisciplinary approach, which has the potential to create resilient and self-sufficient communities in vulnerable regions, ensuring long-term success.

Urbanization has had a significant impact on Bangladesh and will continue to do so in the coming decades, leading to a shortage of housing in urban area and consequent emergence and expansion of the ‘urban poor’. Among all the ‘urban poor’, children are more vulnerable. At an age when family support, education and other resources are needed, they often lack the most basic living conditions and sometimes even struggle to survive. Therefore, this project aims to explore the potential of housing design on alleviating the issue of urban poor children in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

The research focuses on the principles and features of an ideal child-centric community and children-friendly spaces, and the affordable housing practices in south Asia. In response to the research, the target area for the design project is in Sylhet city, on the south bank of the Surma River, next to the city icon Keane bridge. By adopting a mix-income model in residential building (lower floors for low-income group, upper floors for middle-income group), the design provides housing units and common spaces catering to different income groups as well as incorporating shared areas for activities, to balance the respect for lifestyles and social mix. Additionally, the project introduces diverse indoor and outdoor activity spaces for children at different scales, satisfying the needs of children of different ages, genders and economic backgrounds. Moreover, to adapt to the climate, the project adopts three main environmental strategies, namely green infrastructure, water conservation and climate resilience (particularly in terms of ventilation and solar protection).

Ultimately, the project aims to establish a model of an equitable, vibrant, environmentally adaptive and child-centric community that can be applied to other areas with similar issues of urban poor children.

This research is motivated by the scholarly calls for new concepts and analytic tools for documenting, analysing, and theorizing complex urban territories such as those of cities in Africa. With implicit comparative intent, it takes the case of Addis Ababa city and its old and typifying places—the sefer, to develop and test a new architectural transdisciplinary research methodology referred to as the trinocular. By way of this methodology, it unearths and introduces sefer, iddir, and gebbi of Addis Ababa as not only socio-spatial phenomena but concepts and vocabulary for a located and nuanced reading of the city itself. Sefer are introduced as flexible boundary conditions that are primarily cognized by their dwellers—results of indigenous and autochthonous foundation and continued processes of self-actualization by communities that construct them. Iddir is unearthed as a form of social capital embedded in sefer that appears in the structures of relations among residents. And the gebbi as an urban spatial typology that constitutes the sefer’s morphology—the last frontier of communality just prior domestic spaces which, in many cases, can be a single multi-functional room.
These concepts and vocabulary, it is argued, in both practical and metaphoric sense, should be the starting point of new urban imaginaries for Addis Ababa. Urban planning and housing projections thus, should draw inspiration from these notions, elements, and phenomena. Furthermore, lessons learnt from the trinocular and the findings are presented as new avenues for architectural research in similar, less-known, and complex urban conditions as the sefer of Addis Ababa.

The project uses a tangible and visual method for eliciting the shareholder’s spatial needs using a game-based approach. The design game resembles a board game in conjunction with Lego and functions on a more abstract level in relation to the built environment. The game is intended for use in a collaborative design that allows end users to collectively configure their space based on their spatial requirements and priorities which otherwise may not be met by standard conventional design in the top-down approach. The development of the design game abstracts the working spatial and social qualities of slum settlements within Ababa’s inner city (specifically kebele compound houses) and embeds them into a system of configurational elements and rules for configuring a low-rise courtyard-based incremental housing. This system of design flows a modular co-ordination system based upon a tartan grid. The end users use the game elements (boards, modules, activity cards & tokens) to configure their space based on the defined game rules. In the game play process, the stakeholders (players) will identify and weigh different domestic and commercial spaces, functions and sizes based upon their priority to form their configuration of hierarchic spatial framework and shared spaces. The method of developing the game can be replicated to create design games for different contexts. The game serves as a simulation of a design problem that facilitates trade-offs, design ideation, projection of stakeholder needs, preferences, and co-creation. At the basic level, the game can be used to collect information about end-user preferences regarding spatial configuration, the use of tokens creates a trade-off where players have to prioritize their immediate spatial needs. At a higher level, the game can be used in a bottom-up planning strategy for ideating new housing solutions and upgrading existing ones.

Focusing on the design of large-scale housing schemes, this doctoral dissertation examines the extent to which the architecture of dwelling was affected by the oil-led geopolitics of the Cold War, and influenced by the modernist logic of architectural design and urban planning in Iran’s period of high-modernisation (1945-1979), as Eskandar Mokhtari termed it. This study questions the influence of the country’s geopolitical position during the Cold War, and its impact on the architecture of dwelling. It shows how a series of experimental housing solutions, initiated by leading Iranian architects mostly educated in the West (Europe and North America) became a physical expression of both the state’s modernisation demands and people’s everyday needs. Finally, it illustrates how the design mechanisms employed by these architects enabled for a continual and constant change and transformation in their proposed housing schemes, and empowered the users of space to designate and establish a set of relations with their living environment. While this study could be seen as a contribution to the discourse of urban modernisation in Iran, mainly by focusing on the agency of the dweller in the transformation through time of public housing districts in the country, it also aims to address some current issues related to the design and production of public housing. It seems that in the process of housing development, architects and decision-makers with different backgrounds employ two distinct approaches that mostly cannot be resulted in a convergent solution. While this gap between visions and realities of public housing policies and designs might be seen as a universal as well as a common phenomenon, this issue resulted in many critiques on the development of public housing and built environments, in Iran. Iranian architects criticised the government for its top-down housing policies overemphasising the application of industrialised methods for the production of houses, but neglect the importance of people’s socio-cultural practices as well as vernacular patterns of inhabitation for housing design. On the contrary, decision-makers describe housing solutions provided by architects mostly as visionary and inefficient. Accordingly, investigating overlaps between these divergent approaches is of vital importance, as it would foster and promote a dialogue among multiple stakeholders involved in the process of housing development, and illustrate the roles that architects can perform therein. In Iran’s period of high-modernisation, the architecture of dwelling was widely seen as a place to fulfil the state’s ambitious goals of modernisation projects, and simultaneously to resist universalising tendencies. The Iranian Finance and Planning Organisation prepared five distinct Development Plans, where housing for middle and low-income families held a prominent place. Indeed, these Plans projected the national and international socio-political and economic condition of the time that resulted from rural-urban migrations and the demographic changes being seen in Iran. Accordingly, each Plan led to the construction of a series of large-scale housing projects in urban areas. Among these projects, Kuy-e Chaharsad-Dastgah (1946-50), Kuy-e Narmak (1951-58), Kuy-e Kan (1958-64), Kuy-e Ecbatana (1972-92), and Shushtar-Nou (1975-85) were designed and developed as experimental models by leading Iranian architects, to promote and foster a synthesis of Western living standards and Iran’s vernacular patterns of inhabitation. By investigating these models initiated in three different stages of modernisation in Iran, this dissertation, first, unfolds the processes that created/led to collaboration and negotiation among visions and realities of stakeholders (particularly architects and policy/decision-makers) involved in the production of houses and provision of housing solutions. Then, it shows how the mechanisms employed for the design of these housing schemes enabled for a continual and constant change and transformation. Finally, this study argues that each of these housing models is embedded with a form of inhabitable voids that could be seen and read as heterotopia, as Michel Foucault defined. In other words, incorporating some local archetypes into the design process of these projects implies and creates a certain type of place that the ‘other’ space would flourish. Accordingly, these heterotopic voids might include a creative potential/characteristic to be perceived as an omnipresent tool from the disciplinary toolbox of architecture that would cater for providing certain forms of relationships among people and with their living environment.

The first interactions of the child with its environment can already have long-lasting impacts on its worldview (weltanschauung) and psychoanalytical state. This makes the architecture of housing, especially in poor regions, such as Nalasopara in Mumbai, a critical key point for the development of the next generations. However, after the economic liberalization of India, affordable housing has increasingly shifted from vernacular environments towards a dehumanizing accommodation of people in redeveloped chawls, so-called “vertical slums”.
This thesis aims to investigate the matter and propose an alternative for the chawl redevelopment that can foster children's development and create a sense of community and identity in their dwelling environment without neglecting the pressing issues of density and affordability.

One of the most striking things bout the city of Mumbai, and more specifically Nalasopara, is the conflict visible between the formal and informal natures of the city. In a city where informal work and precarious lifestyles, are becoming ever more common, with currently 81% of india’s ecmonmy in the informal sector, the systems used to house this rapidly growing population is varied and complex but predominantly led by neoliberal and market driven economic tendencies. These systems demand a formal, top down and individual pproach towards the production of hosuing. This project aims to investigate these conflicts in the context of Mumbai and propose an architecture that can cater for needs and ambitions of the informal and precarious opulation of Nalasopara, in a way that suits the private developer and find a balance between these two mismatched systems.

Co-housing project and development scheme for Nala Sopara
The main objective behind this project is to explore potential solutions to the housing problem in Mumbai. To achieve this objective, I have developed a structured approach. This will consist of extensive research into the nature of the problem at every level. These ‘levels’ consist of the meta: Neoliberalism, the structural: Hyper-commodification of housing, and the tangible: the lived experience of those individuals who are embroiled in the extremes of these processes. Another facet of research will be into existing community based housing initiatives, both in India and around the world. The culmination of these inquiries will be the creation of an architectural design brief which will inform the design of a housing model. It is expected that the outcome of this thesis will be the development of an effective design brief template and subsequent housing model, which can better address the housing situation in Mumbai. Beyond Nalasopara and Mumbai, it is intended that the thesis research will also respond to the growing global issue to do with free market housing. This would not be a model per say; but rather, a way of thinking about the core of the problem before addressing individual cultural dimensions.

The effects of India’s shift towards economic liberalisation, globalisation and privatisation in the mid 1990’s has drastically altered the landscape of its cities. These powerful forces have imposed further spatial disjuncture on an unplanned city. More specifically, forces of contemporary urbanisation plague the developing fabric of Mumbai’s urban periphery. Nala Sopara lacks an adaptive, secure and inclusive physical identity, which is situated in, and modeled off the existing needs and practices of its locality. The colonisation of the area by newly established ‘handshake chawls’ has become a dominant condition which disrupts and destroys existing domestic practices and patterns of habitation. The transformative typological variation and morphological potential of typology present in Mumbai, from the city’s first settlement to present day developments, makes the impact of typology on domestic life clear. This process of typological renewal, termed typology genealogy by Atelier Bow Wow, questions what the various typological shifts or variations afford or disallow their inhabitants. This project aligns with their thinking, which poses the role of the architect as one who observes and applies the efficiencies of user appropriation in the creation of new typologies.
The prevailing response to rising density requirements in this area lacks severely in social sustainability. In combining ethnographic research with a typological approach, the project seeks to primarily address three core themes: [1] flexibility and growth; [2] the urban public/private space spectrum; [3] open space hierarchies. These three inter-related motives work towards creating an urban domestic fabric which is informed by and empowers endemic habitation practices.