Page 40 - HUDCO Award for Best Practices - 2024

THEME: HOUSING, URBAN POVERTY AND INFRASTRUCTURE

LESSONS LEARNED

Foundation of the practice of Recycle bin is to respond to externalities in societies through the act of design. Slums are externalities
with complex layers. Design application conventionally starts and ends with the act of building houses in informal settlement. Here
we chose to start with a social process of channelizing social energy and all the interventions becomes product of the social process.
Slum being an externality with no models of fairly solving the same has been the motivation to generate a process and intervening
becoming a learning process has fuelled the process further.

Slum dwellers international being an international movement has inspired the design strategy of the social process, aranaya housing
has inspired as context driven building process as case studies that inspire. They have helped in addressing challenges in driving the
community to coincide with ideas regarding working for common wellbeing in their spaces. Intelligence of the group has successfully
channelized common willpower as slum dwellers international has successfully done. Aranya housing has shown us how the space
carving can come out from a design process that responds to the physical and social context and how it will influence the behavior
and in turn how the behavior will influence and shape the space back.
In case of a scale up, or transfer, the main crux is to pick the right clues from the ground and design from there. Each community
has its own DNA as much as they have collective patterns. The life of all intervention depends on how much it is rooted to and
originates from the inherent patterns of the community. The clues lie in observing the voices, the collective behavior patterns at the
more intrinsic level, and that sums up to the cultural heritage of all communities. Without understanding the same, the interventions
become aliens. Alienation is the first step to abandonment. What lies in ahead of abandonment is where we often see the origins of
crimes as well. On the other side, tapping the same would give miracle like impact on scales that are unpredictable as well. This is
where any intervention would touch the scale of a human smile.

Image: A View of Makkal Mandram

Image: A View of Makkal Mandram Exterior view of SHG units

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