AFFORDABLE HOUSING FOR LOWER MIDDLE INCOME GROUP / BUILD BANGLADESH
Area: 12150 sqm
Location: Dholpur, Savar, Dhaka
Organizer: BUILD BANGLADESH (NGO), IAB(Institute of Architects Bangladesh
more on: www.buildbangladesh.org.bd
Being an architect, we are faced with the challenge of the affordable housing backlog, tied to the research data from all sorts of agencies working. The understanding of a perfect model of a static architecture can only be a marginal achievement for a certain time. The inevitable resultant of the passage of time is growth and adaptability. A hope for the next century or so, we should be asking a more core question, what do we keep? What do we build together of which we can be happy and proud about? What is nature of the built that makes us, ‘us’?
Today we are in an ever-changing world. The challenge is to address with the minimum, while dealing with the juxtapositions of technological advancement and encounters of a developing country in a sensible way. But the question is not what an affordable housing is; it is more like what is affordability and what is a housing. With this hypothesis, a comprehensive act of creation, together that strengthens a sustainable growth and ownership model starting with a community adept to address future.
As we follow our own heart; festivals, gatherings, meetings, going to bazars, rituals, celebrations etc., are that which binds us all, with our childhood memories and in time. The families here are close knit with a tendency of making a joint cluster of homesteads, making neighborhoods, eventually a village, to towns, to cities. That is essentially us. The cities that we live in, based on industrial model and scarcity of land, the block tower model of housings negates our family values, socio-cultural fabric and forces us in an alienization. The answer lies in our Bengal fabric and transforming those joint homestead neighborhoods with core values that make us, stretched in vertical grounds; a vertical ‘R–urban’ (Rural and Urban together) village.