Texas based buildingcommunityWORKSHOP (bc) is a nonprofit community design center seeking to improve the livability and viability of communities through thoughtful design. It enriches the lives of citizens by bringing design thinking to areas where resources are most scarce. To do so, bcWorkshop recognizes that it must first understand the social, economic, and environmental issues facing a community before beginning work.

Founded in 2005 by architect Brent Brown, AIA bcWorkshop has multiple initiatives throughout Texas, focusing on neighborhoods that are traditionally denied access to the professional design resources. Its diverse programs are unified by a commitment to building community. They begin with an acknowledgement that the social structure of a community is the best guide to designing and building the physical structures.

bcWorkshop first drew widespread acclaim for its RAPIDO housing program, launched in 2008 in the Rio Grande Valley after Hurricane Dolly. Post disaster, the recovery process can take many years, and in poverty-stricken areas rebuilding must also contend with pre-existing inequalities in the infrastructure. Rapido seeks to shorten this timeline to months. It is a bottom up, community-based approach centered on families that goes beyond architectural issues to examine every level of process, including social, economic and political contexts. RAPIDO is founded on a deep commitment to collaborate with residents, drawing them into the design process at the very beginning and keeping them involved throughout. The result integrates community outreach, case-management, housing design, construction and resource deployment. The program has since been exhibited internationally, including at the world UN Habitat Conference.

On a more intimate scale, the Congo Street Initiative is a resident-led revitalization effort in the Jubilee Park neighborhood of East Dallas. Congo Street began as an alley in the 1920’s. Its residents were poor, but the community was closely knit. The street flooded continually and over the years the small homes fell into disrepair. In 2008, bcWorkshop began the Congo Street Initiative as a way to redevelop the block without evicting longtime residents. Working with a team of architecture and engineering students, they redesigned the street and six houses on its north side using four guiding principles: 1. Collaborate with homeowners on design. 2. Keep the small scale of the neighborhood. 3. Promote sustainability 4. Respect the residents’ economic situations by ensuring the homes could be affordably maintained. This sort of social resilience actually functions as a form of disaster resilience, letting bcWORKSHOP work at both ends of the scale.

We had a chance to speak with Brent about the origins of bcWORKSHOP and the evolution of their process on Social Design Insights. Listen to the episodes below.

For over twenty years, US engineer Dr. Ashok Gadgil’s work has focused on designing low-cost technologies that help the world’s poorest and most vulnerable.

Dr. Gadgil is Faculty Senior Scientist and was Director of the Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. He is also Distinguished Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He specializes in heat transfer, fluid dynamics, and technology design for development and has substantial experience in technical, economic, and policy research on energy efficiency and its implementation – particularly in developing countries. 

Gadgil is best known for three projects; the first was sparked by a 1993 cholera epidemic in South and Southeast Asia. “UV Waterworks” uses UV light from a low-pressure mercury discharge (similar to that in a fluorescent lamp) to disinfect drinking water. The system has no moving parts and can be run using even a car battery or solar cell to disinfect approximately 4 gallons per minute. As of 2015, five million people benefited from the system. It is estimated to save more than one thousand lives per year.

In 2004, USAID requested Gadgil’s help to design a better stove for refugees in Darfur. Now on its fourteenth iteration, the Berkeley-Darfur stove burns less than half the wood or charcoal of a traditional stone fireplace. Throughout the stove’s evolution, Gadgil’s team focused on what the refugees wanted and needed; for example, the stoves were modified for cost and simplicity to be manufactured locally. Today, more than forty thousand are in use throughout Africa.

The third project, ECAR (ElectroChemical Arsenic Removal) addresses the issue of arsenic contamination in groundwater—a problem that kills an estimated one out of five adults in Bangladesh. ECAR uses small amounts of electricity for the controlled release of a particular iron rust. The rust binds irreversibly with the arsenic and can be removed by settling, leaving the water safe to drink. The process is undertaken at room temperature and is highly effective, even with high levels of arsenic.

In addition to his work, Dr. Gadgil has authored or co-authored over 140 journal papers, and 120+ conference papers. He served as editor of the journal Annual Review of Environment and Resources since 2009 and was the founding editor of Open Access journal, “Development Engineering” published by Elsevier. 

We had an opportunity to speak with Ashok Gadgil about simple, low-cost solutions to global public health on our podcast, Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.

Anna Heringer is an award-winning leader in architecture who utilizes the skills of the communities she works in as well as low-tech, sustainable materials like mud and bamboo.

As an architect and honorary professor of the UNESCO Chair of Earthen Architecture, Building Cultures, and Sustainable Development Anna Heringer focuses on the use of natural building materials. Through her projects, Heringer has sought to give local craftsmen and communities confidence in their use of traditional building methods, preparing them for the future. She also strives to maintain ecological balance, avoiding the detrimental effects of modern architectural methods.

Heringer first gained recognition for her design of a primary school for the Modern Education and Training Institute (METI), an NGO operating in the impoverished northern village of Rudrapur, Bangladash. The METI Handmade School was built using human labor alone, demonstrating that large, highly functional, well-designed structures can be built “simply,” using traditional materials. Seeing their beautiful craftsmanship incorporated into a well-built two-story structure, local residents were filled with immense pride. The school soon became a catalyst for further development in the community.

DESI, a vocational school for electricians, is of interest not only because it is powered by solar energy but as it is the first mud-built structure in Bangladesh to have indoor plumbing. An extension of the METI project, it called on the services of local students and craftsmen in the hope that the skills they learned would be reapplied in the region. While local materials, mainly mud and bamboo, were used, structural stability and viability were improved with a masonry foundation and damp-proofing. No machinery was used in the construction apart from utilizing cows for mixing the earth, water, and rice straw. 

More recently, Anna and her team worked on the prototype for the “Birth Room.” Hospitals are usually made with ultra-hygienic, cold, shiny, and non-tactile materials. In addition, while there are established spaces for most physical and medical practices, we do not have specific spaces for giving birth. The space, designed in collaboration with Ana Duer, Martin Rauch, and Sabrina Summer, is a prototype for a different kind of space made of earth. 

In 2022, The Essential Beauty exhibition of Anna Heringer’s work opened at Madrid’s Museo ICO.

Basurama is a collective of Spanish artists creating projects that provide cultural amenities while facilitating a wider conversation about the production of waste in our consumer society and how it can be transformed into a resource.

The founding members met while students at Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. Rejecting the conventions of architectural education, the group took to the streets – engaging, participating and learning from the city around them. Best known for creating colorful playgrounds from landfill waste such as old tires, wooden pallets, and discarded plastics, Basurama’s work asks viewers to reconsider wasted space, wasted energy, and how higher thinking on these issues can lead to urban rejuvenation.

In addition to their architectural projects, Basurama has also developed a unique community training program around the concept of waste. Residuos Sólidos Urbanos (RUS), or Urban Solid Waste, is a public art multi-format project that considers waste, both in solid and spatial senses. The projects look at waste as a material resource with which to reactivate abandoned space, operating under the belief that new public spaces can form from a combination of waste and wasted space. Each RUS project starts with a research trip to get in contact with locals and get to know the city (conflicts, community, NGOs, artists, universities, etc.). From there, the research is organized, local collaborators are chosen, projects are designed and the group subsequently works with municipalities to secure local permissions. The ambition is to leave a community with the skills to convert its own waste into usable material.

Recently, Basurama has been focused on working in participatory processes with public schools to collaboratively redesign the school courtyards, making them more accessible and equitable. Their newly opened project, “Colina del Reciclaje,” saw tires repurposed as material for the construction of a playground. In the past year, they have embarked on a similar project creating playgrounds by reusing fallen trees left by a snow storm in the parks of Madrid. 

We had a chance to speak with Nicolas Herringer of EXYZT, along with Alberto Nanclares of Basurama on Social Design Insights. Listen to the episodes below.

Barefoot College is an Indian organization that encourages the rural poor to attain self-sufficiency by providing training in education, technology, and work skills.

Bunker Roy began the Barefoot College in 1972 with the belief that the solutions to the problems of rural India lay in the villages, not in outside assistance. Since its inception, the goal has been to work with marginalized and exploited rural poor living on less than $1 a day, lifting them over the poverty line with dignity. 

The College has applied rural traditional knowledge and skills to build homes for the homeless, collect rainwater in schools and communities where potable water sources are scarce, and spread socio-economic messages at the grassroots level through puppetry. Only technologies that can be understood and controlled by the rural communities have been introduced to improve the quality of life of the poor.

The Barefoot College trains women in areas traditionally dominated by men. Since 1972, over 6,525 housewives, mothers & grandmothers, midwives, farmers, laborers, and small shopkeepers have been trained as Barefoot midwives, handpump mechanics, artisans, weavers, parabolic solar cooker engineers, FM radio operators and fabricators, dentists, and school teachers. 

Women who are single mothers, middle-aged, divorced, physically challenged, or illiterate are prioritized for training because they need the opportunity and income the most. The organization has identified more than 7,000 women with leadership qualities and empowered them with skills and in processes of democratic participation.

In one of its most innovative programs, the College trains women to be solar engineers, addressing issues of rural poverty as well as access to energy. As part of a program with the Indian Government, the College operates an exchange program where uneducated women are selected from rural villages and brought to Tilonia for a six-month fellowship. Because many of the women are illiterate, they learn through memorization and color-coded charts. They return with the skills necessary to electrify their village with sustainable solar technologies. The woman is then paid a monthly retainer to fix and maintain the solar equipment. 

The Barefoot College Tilonia has trained 1,708 illiterate or semi-literate rural women from 96 countries and has electrified over 75,000 households, saving about 45 million liters of kerosene from polluting the environment. One of the greatest impacts of the program is the increased confidence of women from marginalized backgrounds who are now valued as changemakers in their communities.

Bait al Karama foresees the establishment of a social-cultural center that is run by women and managed according to a social enterprise business model, where food-related activities are the vehicle to develop regular income for the women involved as well as the means to sustain a social and cultural meaningful program.

Translated as “House of Dignity,” Bait al Karama is located in the Nablus Old Center, an area devastated by conflict. As a result of economic decline, women have had to step into the public sphere in unprecedented ways yet lack adequate spaces to earn, socialize and congregate. 

Bait al Karama has two main goals. First, it supports women’s social and economic needs through a food-based social enterprise. Second, it hopes to draw international attention to the Old City as a place of art and culture via cultural and artistic initiatives and sustainable tourism. To achieve these goals, the center hosts lunches and culinary tours to explore the culinary traditions of the Old City. It also provides social and educational activities for the community. 

In addition to generating income through tuition and fees for cooking classes, the center allows for a cross-cultural conversation through which the women can tell their stories, disseminate Nablusian cuisine, and promote peace and understanding.

The center has multifunctional rooms to host gatherings and workshops, but the focus is the cooking school and its attendant workshops and classes. The women of the Old City teach visitors how to make traditional favorites, and the center offers supplemental educational programs for the women themselves, including regular workshops on basic nutrition, as many of the women in the area are struggling with food disorders brought on by posttraumatic stress.

Recently, the project “Fatima’s Chronicles” – an oral narration of food, taste, and gestures – has begun as a further step to involve the local community in a process of awareness towards their own food heritage and to actively engage with its preservation. This “recipe book” will emerge from a multitude of voices from the community itself. The project consists of participatory research into the local food production, recipes, and food spaces in the Old City, involving the 50-70 women and youth who already participate in Bait al Karama’s activities.

We chose to honor Bait al Karama as sometimes peace needs to be designed. For many communities around the world who are dealing with conflict, statelessness, occupation and violence, design offers a meaningful and achievable step towards a more peaceful tomorrow. What we choose to design, and how we choose to design can act as a bulwark against the hopelessness and desperation created by war.

Asiye eTafuleni (AeT) is a South African non-profit focused on promoting inclusive urban planning and design to support the livelihoods of informal workers operating in public spaces not officially allotted to them.

Often, traders in markets and at street-side vendor stalls may have worked out of the same stall in the same place for years without any formal permission or right to use the space. Without knowledge of the technical mechanisms of planning, zoning, and design, these informal workers come at a serious disadvantage in any debate about how public space is used and frequently face eviction. AeT founders believed that support for informal economic spaces like these markets should be integrated into the city’s planning and budgeting priorities. Support for these spaces allows culturally important spaces to be developed, benefitting the entire city while also maintaining the livelihoods of informal workers. 

Since its founding in 2008, AeT has worked to develop strong relationships with local and international stakeholders and create new opportunities for research, design, advocacy, and education around informal work and urban environments. The organization uses a participatory approach to empower the working poor to become co-developers in their own environments. Through its work, AeT has been recognized for its local and global achievements and provides an example of an integrated program for the inclusion of informal workers into urban settlements.  

Asiye eTafuleni boasts a diverse team of architects, social scientists, lawyers, and informal traders. This diversity and decades of experience give it both the knowledge and the street credibility to work with the trading community in developing higher levels of organization and capacity to advocate for rights and appropriate space and infrastructure in urban public spaces.

AeT’s most visible project work has been at Warwick Junction, Durban’s primary transportation node. The hub accommodates approximately 460,000 commuters and 5,000 traders per day. Within Warwick Junction, Asiye eTafuleni has taken on a variety of projects, principally around creating a stable and viable environment for traders. It has also extended to participatory research, co-design, and legal, as well as other forms of advocacy that work to uphold and defend the vendors’ rights to the city. The organization has recently contributed to the preparation of a set of national guidelines for Public Space Trading.

A Rwanda-based practice, Active Social Architecture (ASA) focuses on social architecture, affordable solutions, and the use of local materials.

Active Social Architecture designs inspiring, comfortable, and functional spaces tailored to the users’ needs, expectations, and overall budget. The ensuing process is a constant interaction of stakeholders’ participation, architectural practice, and research. In each project, design is approached in a holistic manner and utilized to add value to community-based projects; architecture is understood as a creative means of problem-solving, providing cost-effective solutions that are attractive, affordable, and improve upon the existing environment. Each project is rooted in the findings of research on similar communities, current local architecture, precedents, and context.

ASA takes care to explore locally sourced materials and the most appropriate environmental approach. Once the best materials and methods have been selected, the practice utilizes craftsmanship and innovative compositions to ensure that each project delivers a positive experience to users. 

With over 150 projects, ASA is a master in the design of educational and health facilities where each building’s structure itself is viewed as an “added tool” contributing to a child’s growth and stimulation or facilitating the patients’ healing. 

In 2019 the current partners founded ASAreacts, a social enterprise that develops non-profit projects in contexts of very limited means. One such project is Ubugingo (or “well-being” in Kinyarwanda), developed to help the Government of Rwanda to achieve the SDG 2050 by tackling the smallest chain of the health system, the Health Post (HP). 

The Health Post is the most diffused health facility in the territory. It provides first aid, sanitation, and health assistance to the local communities. The current number of HPs in the Country is only 500. In order to accomplish the Sustainable Development Goals, the Government of Rwanda will need to provide 1600 Health Posts by 2050.​ 

ASA designed three different sizes of HPs: Small, Medium, and Large, with a modular system that allows the developer to choose the most suitable size to implement according to its financial capacity, the social context, the needs of the health services in the area, and the land size. 

Through this kind of project, ASA reacts to the local constraints and the social needs of health, sanitation, and education improvement through projects that work to reverse decades of structural inequality that denied rural Rwandans opportunities more readily available to their urban counterparts.

Arquitecturas Colectivas is a massive open-source network of people & groups interested in the participatory construction of the built environment. Their body of work is collectively immense as it exists as a “network of networks.” The project was founded in 2007, and welcomes professionals, students, individuals and groups. The common thread among the practitioners and their work is a willingness to manipulate the existing fabric of the built environment.

Most projects apply a process where someone perceives their urban environment needed to be changed. They develop an alternative, and then implement it.

The Arquitecturas Colectivas network exists so that participants all over the world can share strategies on how to positively effect change within the built environment. Ideas are discussed, groups convene, and projects are shared in an open-source environment.

Founded in 2010, Arquitectura Expandida (AXP) is a design collective based in Bogota, Colombia focused on building structures for and with communities that cannot afford to go through official channels for design and construction.

AXP invites communities to self-organize around neglected spaces, collaborating with local residents to identify areas of neglect that could be improved by good design and collective effort. They then work with community organizations to navigate (or in some cases avoid) the civic bureaucracy. The collective is careful to avoid a central role, providing only the design and construction expertise for the execution of the projects. The collective’s design philosophy relies heavily on an embrace of sustainable, affordable, and reclaimed materials.

Since 2015, Arquitectura Expandida has been working on Le Casa de le Lluvia, or the Brainstorming House, in Bogotá. The project is conceived as a cultural and environmental community center in a context of informality and scarce investment from municipal authorities. Since its conception, the process has been promoted by several community leaders and collectives from seven neighborhoods around the Fucha River in the eastern hills of Bogotá. Together, they constantly promote manifold, small-scale projects to improve the neighborhood, from sanitation to reforestation, waste cleanup, and land removal. These are the kind of socio-spatial improvements that should be provided/supported by the municipality, however, due to the legal constraints affecting the entire neighborhood (a legalization process that has lasted over 20 years), local authorities are reluctant to execute major (and urgent) infrastructure projects. 

Since 2015, the Fucha neighborhoods have been regularized by the mayor’s office. However, this regulation was announced alongside news of extensive damages to property and the displacement of families who live in an area qualified as at risk of natural disasters. Moreover, the public administration is not willing to invest in mitigation, although it has done so to enable other strategic urban projects. Now, La Casa de la LLuvia has become a neighborhood symbol of resistance and of the right to the city, for which many families have fought after years of state neglect.

We had an opportunity to have an extended conversation with Arquitectura Expandida on Social Design Insights. Listen to the episode below.