Founded by Gianluca Stasi, Ctrl+Z Architecture practices collaborative, participatory, self-construction initiatives throughout the world. It believes that at its heart, architecture is more about interaction with communities than specific materials or approaches.

Recently, Ctrl+Z has had a particular focus on low-tech, low-cost geodesic domes. Since 2010, Ctrl+Z has been teaching a series of educational workshops and programs entitled “Geodesic Geometries,” wherein students are encouraged to utilize found and recycled material in a collaborative manner. Experiments have been conducted with pallets, and window blinds, with an emphasis on helping students understand how materials can be multi-purposed.

Ctrl+Z’s approach is based on a philosophy of engagement – that form and material arise out of the method of interaction one chooses.

Where possible, Ctrl+Z has explored alternative markets as a means to actualize projects, including collective work, self-building, mutual aid and barter systems.

The Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University in New York City is an urban research hub linking design, architecture, urbanism, the humanities with data science. It focuses on using data in the service of social justice; building maps and other visual tools to help scholars, students and collaborators understand cities and their inherent issues from conflict to inequality.

The Center for Spatial Research at Columbia University in New York City is an urban research hub linking design, architecture, urbanism, the humanities with data science. It focuses on using data in the service of social justice; building maps and other visual tools to help scholars, students and collaborators understand cities and their inherent issues from conflict to inequality.

The Center first gained international attention in 2003 with its “Million Dollar Blocks” project. Working in collaboration with the Justice Mapping Center, it documented, mapped and created visualization strategies that showed the neighborhoods where the majority of incarcerated people in New York City came from. Unsurprisingly, they covered very few, mostly poor, urban neighborhoods. The costs of incarcerating people from single city blocks are in the millions of dollars; money that could be pro-actively invested in the communities themselves.

Other projects have included data mapping social media in China to examine the intersection of censorship and activism. In 2016, out of an interest in how conflict makes, unmakes and remakes urban spaces, they created a very high resolution, interactive map of the war-ravaged Syrian city of Aleppo.  Data for the maps is taken from satellite images over a number of years, from before the war in 2012, then again in 2014 and 2016. Their most recent project is around mapping historical New York using maps and census data of Manhattan and Brooklyn between 1850 and 1920, to show how immigration transformed different neighborhoods. The web-based interactive maps will reconstruct the demographic and structural shifts to help understand the magnitude of changes that took place across time.

By harnessing data to create new forms of visualization, the Center hopes to encourage new lines of thinking about urban issues, inequality and conflict. Listen to the episode below.

David Baker Architects is a Bay Area and Atlanta-based firm specializing in affordable housing, green building, and transit-oriented development. With its focus on integrating elegant, contemporary aesthetics with energy conservation and humanity, its work sets the standard for public housing.

Founded in 1982, David Baker Architects has designed and built more than 10,000 dwelling units, including more than 6,000 affordable units throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond. The firm’s work evinces a sincere commitment to doing affordable housing well, involving the community as a whole to develop spaces that go beyond just affordable living spaces. With social housing, support from the local community is vital. In order to obtain it, the concerns of neighboring residents must be respected and considered.

In the Drs. Julian and Raye Richardson Apartments, built in the trendy neighborhood of Hayes Valley in San Francisco, community members were concerned about having people who were formerly homeless move in so close to their own homes. However, DBA designs take care to create a whole community that unifies populations at both ends of the social spectrum. The finished project, developed on a site that opened up after an earthquake collapsed a freeway onramp, is now a vital part of the community. 

The building itself is friendly and livable; All units get natural light, there are on-site medical and counseling resources for residents, and there are even amenities such as outdoor terraces and a roof garden. Additionally, the street-level retail businesses, including a non-profit bakery, bring life and activity to a once deserted corner.

Currently, the practice is working on multiple projects. One such project, 2118 Sacramento street, has 75 units and will bring modular affordable housing for the formerly homeless to Vallejo, California. Another project, Sutter Park, is a 14-story high-rise that will offer 221 new homes, including 44 on-site affordable units, and an adjacent 3,500-square-foot child care center in San Francisco.

Portland, Oregon-based City Repair Project (CRP) seeks to address America’s lack of community gathering spaces by empowering neighborhoods to reclaim public spaces and creatively repurpose them to bring people together.

Founded in 1996 by Mark Lakeman, the City Repair Project is best known for lavishly painted street intersections and ecological interventions that transform a spot initially intended for vehicles into spaces for people to gather. Frequently working in collaboration with Communitecture, a sister organization also founded by Mark Lakeman, each project begins with a dialog among neighbors to determine shared aspirations and goals. The community then works together to erect social architecture while designing, funding, building, and ultimately maintaining the physical space over time. City Repair Project and Communitecture are both active in ecological landscaping projects throughout the city, and the spectrum of infrastructure that is affected by the work spans many scales and types.

Every spring for ten days, the City Repair Project organizes the Village Building Convergence, which draws residents and activists together to design and build their own community amenities. They provide hands-on training in permaculture—a system of design that promotes sustainability through the study and replication of systems that occur in nature. Residents are also coached in CRP’s philosophy of self-empowerment and change.

In 2017, CRP and Communitecture joined forces to create a sleeping pod village for 15 houseless veterans in Clackamas County. The purpose of the Clackamas County Veterans Village (CCVV) is to provide shelter, facilities, and services for Veterans who are homeless so as to facilitate a transition to permanent housing. The project is the third version of their “Partners on Dwelling” initiative. 

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, CRP is working to build back its capacity to take on more place-making and place-justice initiatives. After two years of an online format for the Village Building Convergence, the event is finally taking place in person again. 

We had an opportunity to have an extended conversation with Mark Lakeman of The City Repair Project and Communitecture on Social Design Insights. Listen to the episodes below.

“People don’t want to talk about conflicts.” Avni Sethi, the artist and dancer behind the Conflictorim told The Better India blog in 2017. “People want to talk about conflict resolution, without understanding the situation or confronting and accepting the conflict. We are a neutral party. We do nothing except put the issue on the table for discussion. Because without accepting the existence of a conflict, achieving resolution is futile.”

The Conflictorium is a participatory museum that addresses the theme of conflict. It is divided into 6 spaces starting with the ‘Conflict Timeline’, which attempts to showcase the violent and oppressive past of Gujarat since 1960. ‘Empathy Alley’ shows silhouettes of post-independence political figures, and one can hear famous speeches by each of these visionaries in their original voices. The ‘Moral Compass’ invites visitors to see, read, and touch the Indian constitution. The ‘Memory Lab’ allows visitors to let out their innermost thoughts by adding their notes to the empty jars in the shelves. The ‘Power of the New’ is a sound installation and ‘The Sorry Tree’ appeals to the power of humility and apology by letting visitors tie their apologies to the branches of a tree.

Many memorials and museums focus on a specific conflict. They memorialize a battle, a war, a genocide, or a victory. The Conflictorium transcends this limited framework and holistically address how conflicts begin and how they can be resolved.

In addition to the exhibitions, the center hosts daily poetry readings, discussions and artist workshops.

Communitere is a grass-roots disaster nonprofit operating in Haiti, Peru, the Philippines, Nepal and Greece. They create dynamic, collaborative hubs in communities affected by disaster. Their approach involves an active, experienced, on-the-ground presence that focuses on providing the resources, processes and tools required to empower local communities to take an active role in the renewal of their own community. In addition, they help bridge the gap between individuals who are willing to help and organizations that can effect change.

Communitere, which stands for “Communities United in Response, Relief & Renewal,” was founded by Sam Bloch, who had begun working in disaster relief after the 2004 Asian Tsunami, leading the reconstruction of the coastal village of Laem Pom, Thailand. Bloch soon noticed that rather than taking time to understand the community, large international agencies would come in with a predefined set of objectives, tactics and goals. Bloch’s response was to join forces with other volunteers to set up “maker spaces” so that local people could design their own recovery plans and build what they, not the so-called relief “experts,” wanted.

Communitere now spans three continents: Haiti Communitere, Philippines Communitere, Greece Communitere and Nepal Communitere. In each case they operate out of a belief that survivors aren’t passively waiting for help, but instead are actively engaged in constructing their own futures. The offices embed themselves within a community, providing a space for residents to create their own plans. They also provide tools and resources for community members to execute their own recovery. Providing a lending tool bank may seem a simple thing. However, within the context of a disaster zone, most ordinary citizens have lost their tools and heavy equipment is in short supply. Large NGOs might have plenty of equipment, but they’re inclined to use it to execute their own projects. A tool library allows survivors intent on participating in their own reconstruction to borrow the necessary tools and equipment, creating community, empowerment, and speeding recovery.

Each Communitere office is different and its programming is designed around the requests of a community. Communitere does not start building without specific requests for action. To understand the particular needs of a recovering community, Communitere typically hosts a variety of community meetings and workshops where survivors are encouraged to make their needs known. Moreover, the offices are set up so that the community can take over their management, keeping it going as-is or transitioning it into what is most needed, such as an educational facility or accelerator for entrepreneurs.

As an example, Haiti Communitere hosts approximately 7,000 Haitians per year and provides the following services:

• Internet Café
• Tool Lending Library
• Makerspace
• 3D Printing & Innovation labs
• Co-working offices
• Training facilities

Communitere’s innovative model approaches disaster reconstruction from the bottom up, involving survivors from day one. Their work shows how recovery practices rooted in dignity translate across the world.

Coloco is a collective of landscapers, artists, urban planners, and botanists working in a variety of mediums including mapping, physical gardening, and advocacy.

The collective was founded by the landscape designer Miguel Georgieff and architects Pablo Georgieff and Nicolas Bonnenfant. Since 1999, Coloco has developed urban and landscape design projects, through both collective and direct interventions. Coloco believes that landscape is both a common good and an opportunity for collective thought and action. Coloco explores diverse forms of activism, from workshops and conferences to active forms of gardening to utilize gardening as a form of community building. Fundamentally, Coloco seeks to create places that can bring communities together and generate new ideas among segregated populations.

They begin this process with community engagement, wherein multiple meetings are held to gather diverse ideas. These meetings are a form of collectivization, wherein original cartographic and visualization tools are developed to help all participants arrive at a shared project vision.

Currently, the collaborative is curating the Landscape Biennale of Versailles under the title “La Présence du Vivant” in the Potager du Roi. There, they also have developed a collaborative garden as a temporary piece, called “Le Potager des Autres.” 

In September, after the Biennale, the collaborative plans to initiate other gardens by distributing plants they call “Bosquets Voyageurs.” Some of these plants will be planted in base 217 in the periphery of Paris at a former military airport that they hope to develop into a public park. The rest of the plants will travel to “Foret Demain,” a 3000 sq meters urban forest near Paris.

Collectif Etc. is a French design collective supporting urban experimentation and discovery. They maintain that the traditional construction of the city is vertical and hierarchical, dominated by politics and divided along professional lines, e.g. planners plan, architects design buildings, etc. By these activities occurring in prescribed ways and prescribed times, the results are rigid and unsatisfactory. Collectif Etc. wants to disrupt this vertical framework. Moreover, they believe that citizens have a role to play in shaping their city, and do not need to be confined to the role of passive recipient of a designer’s intent.

The group believes that involving the public in the design process as an equal contributor is essential to creating good public space. They have experimented with built works, but also with urban furniture, lighting devices, as well as organizing conferences and workshops.

Collectif Etc is perhaps best known for its Detour de France – a roving series of twenty projects conducted across France. They took a caravan on the road, stopping in multiple cities to execute projects. They would stay one to two weeks, and typically spend less than €2,000 at a stop. Collectif Etc collected most project funds as donations from the group’s relatives. Each stop was in itself a statement unto itself. The group reached out to other design collectives throughout Europe (including EXYZT and Atelier d’Architecture Autogeree) and stopped to collaborate with them. Detour de France was essentially a meta-project, where the group positioned themselves as interlocutors and germinators of a conversation about public space throughout France.

Pliny Fisk III and Gail Vittori are pioneers and leaders in green building, sustainability, and ecological thinking. Their mission is to develop environmentally sustainable building components systems, neighborhoods, and cities.

Fisk and Vittori co-direct the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems, which works to design holistic systems that identify and utilize the full life cycle of products, buildings, and regions. While most modern building materials are not designed with multi-functional objectives in mind, the Center’s procedures seek out methods that create or reinforce cyclical regeneration at multiple levels. For example, processing saline water from brine can create magnesium oxide-based cement, while producing fresh water and hydrogen energy as by-products.

The center has developed a four-pronged approach, emphasizing design, master planning, policy and education, and tools (which include educational games and the creation and testing of building materials). Fisk and Vittori have set up solar hot water heater production for poor towns in South Texas, planned sustainable villages in Nicaragua and China, and created several dozen building materials. In the early 1990s, the pair also helped to create Austin’s city-sponsored green building ratings program—the first of its kind in the world and a model for the U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED rating system. 

Other projects of Fisk and Vittori have ranged from collaborating on an eco-friendly renovation of the Pentagon to groundbreaking planning and design approaches for healthcare facilities, integrating a health-based design approach into green buildings, and designing adaptable building systems for disaster relief and ecovillages based on a re-design and re-engineering of the ubiquitous shipping pallet (conceived as manufactured from hemp). 

In 2006, Metropolis Magazine recognized Fisk as one of 14 Visionaries and in 2008, Texas Monthly called him one of “35 People Who Will Shape Our Future.” In 2015, Vittori took home the Hanley Award for Vision and Leadership in Sustainability, and in November 2020, she received USGBC’s Kate Hurst Leadership Award, which recognizes inspiring women for their outstanding commitment to advancing green building. 

We had an opportunity to speak with Pliny and Gail at a special live episode of our podcast, Social Design Insights, where they shared with us and the audience some of their strategies for global change. Listen to the episodes below.

Build Change, a Denver-based nonprofit systems change catalyst, prevents housing loss caused by disasters.

Founded in 2004 by civil engineer Dr. Elizabeth Hausler, Build Change’s philosophy is distinguished by a homeowner-driven, cash-plus-technical-assistance approach. More than nine out of ten natural disaster-related deaths occur in developing countries and especially in overcrowded, unsafe neighborhoods where housing does not meet basic codes for resilience. 

Post-disaster, NGOs and government agencies often rebuild in ways that are not culturally appropriate or even earthquake resistant. By mobilizing people, money, and technology to transform systems for regulating, financing, building, and improving houses around the world, Build Change puts resilient communities within reach. 

In addition, the organization places an emphasis on supporting women. Build Change employs women trainers and engineers, leading to an increase in the number of mentors and role models for girls, while also working alongside female homeowners, brickmakers, builders, and other community members to encourage female participation in resilient construction practice. 

Using simple, culturally appropriate, and cost-effective retrofitting techniques, Build Change has overseen the construction or reconstruction of more than 90,000 homes and schools, often revitalizing entire neighborhoods in Haiti, China, Nepal, and around the world. 

In Nepal, Build Change has used a combination of technologies (such as AI, ML and VR) to advise the government on resilient housing policy, as well as directly support the recovery of rural communities following a 2015 earthquake. As of 2021, Build Change’s work in Nepal had resulted in more than 150,000 safer people.

Throughout 2020, Build Change piloted a comprehensive technology platform to enable housing evaluators and contractors to digitally assess at-risk homes and strengthen them on behalf of the Government of Colombia’s Casa Digna, Vida Digna program. By the end of 2020, even amidst the pandemic, more than 3,500 homes had been assessed.

In 2021 Build Change released its flagship publication, The Build Change Guide to Resilient Housing: An Essential Handbook for Governments and Practitioners, which consolidates Build Change’s experience developing home improvement programs in 24 countries since 2004.

We had a chance to talk to Dr. Hausler to hear her thoughts on how to make a more resilient world on Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.