This conversation was hosted on the occasion of the publication of Ammodo Architecture 2024 | 2025: Award for Socially and Ecologically Responsible Architecture Worldwide and is included in the print edition. This conversation is part of our ongoing collaboration with Ammodo Architecture.

Federica Zambeletti/KOOZ It’s a joy to have such distant corners of the world connecting together. Let me ask you to introduce yourselves.

André Velásquez / Habitable Thank you; I’m André, an architect from Peru, currently based in Colombia. During the pandemic in 2021, I founded Habitable with an architect colleague and two sociologists. We began working with a community in the peripheral areas of Lima, where the emergency of food scarcity — illustrated by the proliferation of ollas comunes or communal kitchens (literally, communal pots) — had become acute. We work in the architectural realm but draw on the social sciences; from the outset, our focus has been on developing participatory methodologies, so the community is involved in every process we engage with. Acknowledging that whatever the community has to share with us is valid knowledge for building the environment, we try to give the community the space, the tools and the methodology to build this infrastructure — not only what we can design at a desk, but what we can co-create with them. Since 2021 we have collaborated with NGOs and local governments to keep the project alive, working across three teams: housing, care infrastructure and the improvement of public spaces.

Nuno Flores / Outros Bairros Initiative (IOB) It’s a pleasure to meet you all; I’m Nuno. After studying in Portugal, I began researching self-built areas in Brazil. In 2012, I began teaching in Cabo Verde, and in 2019 I became a consultant to the Minister of Infrastructure there. Together with a team of architects, we set up an experimental group to explore how new policy might be created for self-built areas in the Global South — and so began the Outros Bairros initiative. The idea was to understand how people want to build, and to examine the differences between former colonial districts and the formal and informal settlements across Cabo Verde, where urbanisation is proceeding at speed with little consideration for infrastructure, for dwelling rights or for any political position on reclamation and the right to remain. With the team, we constructed a methodology for opening that discussion across society: between politicians, researchers, citizens, those who have inherited property in these areas, and the people working on the projects. From there we selected the areas we would work in; the principal one was Alto de Bomba.

We started to build a process rather than a project — a sequence of steps and moments in which to renovate or construct infrastructure, and in which cultural projects allow people to find their voice, to reclaim how they want to build, and to arrive at the rehabilitation of the neighbourhood. In the case of Cabo Verde, it produced a set of guidelines to inform governments on how new policies for self-built areas might be made. Above all, the work is about the distance between how people imagine the urbanisation of the future and the older idea of the city we have inherited — a real conflict today, and one that shapes how governance, researchers and society need to think about these areas.

Ruhul Abdin / Paraa Thank you all. I’m Ruhul; I studied architecture and planning in London, and with Arefin and Abbas, we founded Paraa studio in Bangladesh around 2012. Our idea was to have this intersection between learning as a studio and teaching what we learn, while pushing forward those projects we found relevant within the communities we’ve worked with. The practice has overlapped with various disciplines, especially arts and crafts; we’re based in Dhaka, and have been properly situated here since 2014. As a studio, we have experimented with teaching models as a means to understand what the role of architecture might be in a place like Bangladesh; consequently, our projects have been quite experimental — often involving participatory methods and collaborative research tools. Some have worked really well and others, less so.

We are currently working with a consortium of art groups exploring opportunities for civic engagement within various marginalised or at-risk communities. Through our project in Korail — the largest slum or low-income settlement in Dhaka — we’ve continued that agenda; we’re building up towards another arts festival next year. The studio also undertakes small architectural projects that are less engaged with the social-philosophical dilemma of the discipline, but which pay the bills. Our work has been really eclectic over the past decade, which has given us a bit of time — especially after COVID — to really think through our aims as a studio, our values and our philosophy, and what happens with a project after we’re ’done’. As a youngish and diverse practice in the context of Bangladesh, where we are intersecting working-class politics with the art world as well as certain policy interests, we are also thinking through what it means to teach architecture and design from the context of social justice. Our curriculum has been a great way to test pedagogical ideas as much as our design thinking, as well as the limits of collaboration and participation.

KOOZ Architecture for the people is, at heart, a simple mission with nothing experimental about it. Even so, all of your practices engage with participatory design, communities and deep listening. What other kinds of knowledge should we integrate into the curriculum?

RA / ParaaI didn’t study in Bangladesh, but Arefin and my other colleagues did. There have been some recent attempts to overhaul the architectural education system here: the University Grants Commission approved a standardised format, modelled on the American schools and tracing back to the 1960s and 70s — which, in its time, was focused on critical awareness of regional biases, on modernity and counter-modernity, and on the urban and rural conditions. But much of the potential to experiment was lost; within a rigid four- or five-year curriculum where a set of buildings must be designed as you go — from a house to a cultural complex to a neighbourhood to a masterplan — the critique tends to be either that your building is not functioning, or that it’s not good enough.

Architectural education is also competing with other formats of learning — a two- or three-year diploma in architecture engineering teaches you the basic technical skills of designing a building. So while we have architecture graduates laden with skills, they’re competing with less skilled but more adaptable, lower-cost entrants to the market. When we’ve tried to collaborate with universities and institutes, we have found it quite difficult to instrumentalise curricula. At a certain point we felt: why wait for institutionalisation in order to implement it? What value is there in the architects’ board, or in a particular university’s logo, if we can’t teach what we think is important and valuable in contemporary practice? That allowed us to think through a model of pedagogy of our own — how do we become a school of architecture on our own?

Material conditions also exacerbate the situation: we have a young, post-war country with climate-related infrastructural issues — flooding, humidity, especially in the south — and a super-aggressive development industry of high-rise glass towers, replicating other bad urban plans. But coming back to your question — who has the knowledge, who gets to teach it, who provides access to it — I don’t think we’ve fully acknowledged our shortfalls in the process of modernisation. There’s always a flashback to Louis Kahn and Muzharul Islam, and that postwar period of great architecture and socialist thinking about architecture’s role. But why hasn’t that continued? Perhaps talent alone is not the right answer. There’s lots of talent but who nurtures it? Who are the clients for that talent, and who fights for the young architects who want to push the boundaries of meaningful architecture in Bangladesh?

We’ve somewhat stepped away from critique — that’s potentially the job of others. We’re aware of the critical landscape we’re in, but as a small studio we’re still focused on leading by example: testing and putting out ideas that will hopefully contribute to the wider knowledge base of architecture in the longer run.

NF / Outros Bairros Initiative In our work it’s a priority to understand movement and change in people’s lives and how this affects space, rather than implementing fixed models. Yes, you need to construct and to build — but before working in schools and universities around just one kind of architecture, we need to understand how people live. It’s difficult to confine the architect to just one role, because the discipline has a very strong relationship with many others, and with contextual issues.

KOOZ It’s also hard to build that sense of trust and connection. André, your project started around the idea of food and cooking; did that play a role in creating moments of intimacy and comfort with the community?

AV/Habitable I’d like to address the previous question briefly. The way that we build knowledge in architecture schools is an epistemic issue. Particularly in Latin America, we tend to value whatever knowledge comes from ’first-world’ schools over the knowledge in building traditions that originate in the Global South — this relates to the pressure to shape so-called professionals. We’re training architects to respond to neoliberal policies and the market, so whenever there’s a social issue that architects could address here in Peru, there tends to be a paternalistic mode of engagement rather than involving people and understanding the roots of social conditions.

KOOZ Perhaps there is a way of linking them; the act of doing is probably one way of immersing oneself in the work.

AV That’s right; it goes beyond transcending this paternalist perspective. In our experience, this transdisciplinary view — drawing from the social sciences — has given us a different perspective on how to build these relationships with communities. Before engaging, we try to participate in daily activities, for example by cooking and preparing food. Before starting a project or a process, we try to diagnose how people relate to each other, and what social structures emerge — also to build intimacy, acknowledging that we are not part of the community. That way we can demonstrate that we don’t just land in a community, drop our work and leave; rather, we work with them hand-in-hand to sustain these processes; not only by designing infrastructure, but participating with them in whatever we can.

On reflection, it is also about putting our own limits on how these relationships function. Communities have asked us for help with things that are not in our hands — for instance, cases of domestic violence, which we cannot solve. So in these first spaces of involvement with the community, we also set boundaries; otherwise — and this has happened — they may begin asking for things we cannot resolve.

KOOZ As much as we wear many hats, it’s worth understanding which ones we cannot wear. Nuno, the communities you involved in Cabo Verde helped to pave part of the streets; can you share how you build a sense of collective authorship and ownership for those whom your project serves?

NF / Outros Bairros Initiative As I mentioned, whenever we start a project, we promote a lot of discourse with various social actors in the city. We create opportunities to build relationships between inhabitants, citizens, politicians, researchers and the team of architects. One day a week, we used public space to discuss how to improve the project, addressing concerns that are brought forward. Alongside this, we held a big collective discussion — a diagnostic process, built with students from the university — through which we came to understand how people knew the neighbourhood and how they might participate: what materials they could work with, what issues they wanted to address near their homes, and what ideas they had for renovating their own houses.

During this process we learned that the young people wanted to know more about hip-hop — so we made an agreement with the sociology department in Cabo Verde to build an artistic residency around it, and together we produced an online record capturing what this group of young people thought about their neighbourhood and its future. In the case of the pavements, we established a rule at the outset: the construction companies had to employ a minimum of 50% of people living in the neighbourhood. The idea was to strengthen the local economy — to keep the money circulating within the community rather than flowing outside. But about a year in, a group of ten women came to speak with our team. They told us the money from the construction work wasn’t reaching their families; they had no access to it. Once we understood that our work hadn’t created possibilities for these women, we held a big discussion about the problem and decided, with them, to run a paving workshop. They began working alongside us, and by the end they had laid all of the neighbourhood’s pavements themselves. Afterwards, they built a relationship with the municipality, began working for it — and they are municipal employees to this day.

Our idea was always to deepen the discussion, to bring in different kinds of knowledge, and to make each group stronger in its participation — understanding the particular problems of different groups, and helping people find their own ways to increase the wellbeing of their families and the neighbourhood. It depends on the level of organisation people have, and we try not to impose any particular method. We only try to help people to understand which questions we could work on together, towards a better life.

KOOZ That’s a powerful testament to your belief in the strength of an architecture project to enable communities in reclaiming agency, independence and self-sufficiency. This links to the work of Habitable too; beyond building a participatory project, the community hub is about understanding the necessity for people to regain a sense of self-sufficiency, even in terms of food security. How fundamental was it to consider how to enable the community to stand on its own feet?

AV / Habitable Here in Lima, there is usually more than one social actor involved in the territory. In this particular community, the ollas comunes represent one organisation, while the core neighbourhood team is another. In diagnosing these social interactions, we focused first on balancing the power dynamics between the ollas comunes and the neighbourhood community. There were issues between them, so we tried to set a space where these two social actors could talk about the common issues they share. At first, the neighbours were deciding whether the common pot had the right to stay in the community or had to go to some other space; setting this space became a pedagogic process through which they came to acknowledge how important the services of the ollas comunes are — what they can deliver in terms of food security.

Working with the community in this way helped to improve its own organisation, and its understanding of the importance of collaborative relationships with other social actors — in this case, not governmental actors, but those who are already active in the region. This also relates to how fragmented living conditions are in human settlements here in Lima: there is a whole network of actors involved in building the environment who do not want to work together. There’s a tendency to compete rather than to collaborate.

A topic like food security, in our experience, comes from academia rather than an actual acknowledgement from the community. It emerges from a short-term need; communities do engage with government activities, but sustaining those activities is another matter. Now that we are not in the pandemic anymore, food security is not viewed as urgently as before — even though these processes remain very important for family economy, security and food sovereignty. As technicians and people coming from academia, we need to sustain pedagogic processes in collaboration with the community, because otherwise these top-down solutions dissolve. So it is a responsibility for us to give tools and knowledge for these processes to sustain themselves — not only in whatever outcome can come from the built environment, but in the symbolic things that sustain them too.

It is also about putting these issues, strategies and diverse actors back on the public agenda, because these processes must be sustained by budget. Governments are retreating from supporting these social actors, despite the economic environment being much the same. From our point of view, these issues are to be solved not only by the hand of civil society organisations like us, but sustained by support from policies. It transcends our architectural practice, because we are engaging with social issues; we have to understand it as something we work on as a society.

KOOZ Ruhul, you mentioned coexistence, which brings us onto Machan, a platform designed to be inhabited by various realities — architecturally, it’s also very beautiful. As a project drafted by many hands and more than sixty workshops, can you describe some of the hardships and opportunities you encountered?

RA/ Paraa There’s a lot to unpack there. Machan started from a very different place. We’d met some of the community leaders back in 2015, researching informal settlements across Bangladesh; we then worked with them on tiny craft projects, and later on research into urban agriculture, while building and experimenting elsewhere in the city. By the time Machan emerged as an idea, we were drawing on eight to ten years of knowledge about participatory work — its challenges and its limitations. The immediate spark was our bamboo play space, built with a vulnerable group outside the city: what if we made something permanent — a space where culture could thrive? In exploring where that could happen, Korail became a suggestion, then an idea, then design workshops, relatively quickly.

It was messy and very complex: an informal settlement in a prime location, in a city of almost thirty million people, with a lot of eyes on it. Even now, the government proposes demolishing it to build skyscrapers for the people living there — by some estimates, some two hundred thousand souls in Korail alone. As we’d been back and forth for years, doing research that was itself participatory, I think we understood its lived reality from the beginning. Still, it took up a couple of years to make sense of what we could do; we kept asking — still ask — what Paraa’s role is. What does it mean to deliver something architecturally beautiful, if it isn’t meeting the expectations that came through in dozens of workshops?

We had put together a smaller youth group, building their capacity, giving them the tools to ask questions and, fundamentally, to talk to power. Paraa’s intervention is mostly one of facilitation — and yes, that meant creating more than sixty workshops covering everything from rudimentary architectural issues to wider spatial politics, class and gender and the needs of women versus everybody else. In the end, the steering committee came to be led mostly by young women; they are the ones navigating what Machan should be, could be, and needs to be for the people of Korail. The spatial design responded to an initial brief; in practice, it needed to change — walls added, things going missing — reactive to local politics. Between conceiving Machan and building it, Bangladesh went through a student revolution, a change of government, an interim vacuum of political power. There’s a paternal desire — André touched on this — to hold hands throughout the process. It was interesting for us to take a step back instead, and see what the pedagogies, tools and networks we’d shared could do beyond ourselves. That was articulated most clearly in last year’s fire in Korail, in which more than 4,000 homes were burnt. Machan — both as a site and as an organisation — became a first responder: the young people organising internationally through the networks they’d built, managing resource distribution. It showed us there is real capacity within the body of people who run Machan — and limitations, where we continue to support and facilitate.

In Dhaka, having legitimately working-class-led voices is a challenge, given elite capture and the gatekeepers who define culture. When we did the festival, the idea wasn’t to give ourselves a pat on the back — here’s a beautiful building, fantastic — but to ask what Korail needs. We say culture is for everyone — but what does that look like, and what is the value of that cultural production? Machan is having those conversations within itself — about what kind of organisation it wants to be, about social justice and the right to the city, about making friends: who comes when they make a phone call, versus when I do? The youth are also learning to facilitate, and to critique, people arriving from outside: what is your proposal for working with Machan? Actually, we don’t agree — you’re not adhering to the values we share.

I think we need another year or two before we can talk about Machan’s success. The forty or fifty people going through this learning, without the framing of an NGO identity marker, have the freedom to do social justice-oriented work — to challenge injustices within the community and across the city. Because we’re addressing it through the lens of culture, the workshops feel playful rather than like NGO service training. The harder challenge is class politics — the minutiae of an outsider artist from an upper-middle-class background coming in, taking and leaving — and what feminist organising and solidarity might look like. We’re trying to avoid the pitfall of saying, “Here’s a pile of money, now go and do things.”

At what point do the architects no longer need to be involved? Or rather — what’s wrong with continuous involvement, as and when they need us? If there’s a phone call and we have the capacity, of course we do it; that circles back to being a good facilitator and partner, especially when we hold certain power. We’re now discussing what legal entity Machan might become — and how Machan itself might allow other Machans to emerge, in Bangladesh and perhaps elsewhere.

KOOZ Thanks so much. That leads beautifully to my last question for Nuno and André. In your practices, you describe processes which are ultimately never complete — despite the potential risks of attachment and dependency. Could you talk about the impact of time and commitment in your practice — or in a specific project?

NF / Outros Bairros Initiative In my experience, the relationship between architects, communities and all the actors of society is stronger, and has more effect, when we ask how architecture can make its inscription on society — how we want to think about the role of architecture. The challenges facing communities, architects and people have changed a great deal over time, so you need to ask, all the time: what is your role in society, and what is the role of the architect?

After working in Cabo Verde, we looked to establish a methodology to shape and construct policy. Throughout the process we drew on artistic practice to work with people — to understand the real needs of the territory and its communities, and to find a space where people, architects, politicians and researchers could discuss on the same plane and reach agreements about the future policy of the territory and the archipelago. Rather than implementing a hegemonic model, we work with the demands we encounter every day — understanding the specific issues of each territory, and the contradictions that the global system produces in each one. Through workshops and artistic practice, we bring together different types of knowledge to construct the right to the city and the right to the local. The main idea is to propose concrete discussion, all the time, in order to construct efficient politics.

Whether you are working in government, in an association or in an NGO, you must always understand how we can help — and how we can hurt — the communities; how to hold all opinions together in constructing the main idea of the work; and how to ensure that everyone who wants to participate in the collective decision can do so. I really don’t think it is possible to work without collaboration. We are in a pivotal moment in our culture, and you need to keep learning and finding adaptive ways of working.

KOOZ Thank you, Nuno. Perhaps André can share the last word —

AV / Habitable On commitment, I’ll start by saying that we take an ethical-political approach to these processes. Our core conceptual lenses come from Paulo Freire’s popular pedagogy, cross-border investigations, participatory action research and Arturo Escobar’s Designs for the Pluriverse. This conceptual frame gives us not only the tools to understand these processes but, mainly, a way of making space for the community to unfold their own agency in building their environment. We understand that such processes neither start when we arrive nor finish when we leave. The commitment we can offer is just one time frame within the community’s longer historical process of building its environment — but within that frame, we try to share and learn all the tools and knowledge that we can, in order to co-build the infrastructure while sustaining social networks and relationships.

How long we stay — working hands-on with a community — depends a great deal on budget constraints. We’ve learned from experience that we cannot stay too long without materialising some of the work we’re doing together. Participatory processes are very time-demanding, and given the living conditions in these settlements, we are effectively asking communities to give up more of their time to work on habitat solutions — so we try to be careful about how much time we demand. The Community Hub, for example, funded by Ammodo, started in 2022 yet we only finished construction three months ago. It was a really long process; across those years we tried to sustain the relationship with the community and to keep renewing the commitment to the project — which meant many adjustments to the design, and rebuilding the interactions between the local actors involved.

Within the frame of development projects, we also run input and output tests — metrics and research into how far a project is appropriated, or not. These give us a horizon for deciding whether or not to remain working with a community once the infrastructure is built. It has happened that a project is finished and the community says: we’re very grateful for the process, but we’d now rather focus on other kinds of projects for which we’re perhaps not the most suitable actor. And that’s fine — maybe we engage again in the future. But in the bigger frame, because we engage with other political and non-governmental actors working on habitat issues, the concerns we’ve worked on with a community cannot end when a project does. Even after finishing, we continue to address the issues with which our communities struggle.

KOOZ Thank you all so much for being in this virtual space together.

BIOS

Habitable is a Lima-based architecture and urban design practice that works at the intersection of community participation, housing and public space. The Ammodo Architecture Award for Local Scale was given for the 10th of July Family Group’s Community Hub, which was developed in collaboration with a long-standing residents’ association, creating a shared civic space that builds on existing forms of organisation while supporting the community’s ongoing social, cultural and economic life.

Outros Bairros Initiative (IOB) is an interdisciplinary platform based in Cabo Verde that works across architecture, research, education and cultural production to support self-constructed neighbourhoods. Recipient of the Ammodo Architecture Award for Social Engagement, the initiative combines community-led design, public programmes and knowledge-sharing to strengthen local agency while informing broader discussions on urban development and public policy.

Paraa is a Dhaka-based research and design practice founded by Ruhul Abdin, Kazi Arefin and Abbas Nokhasteh. Working across architecture, urbanism and community engagement, the practice explores how participatory design can strengthen civic life in informal settlements. Recipient of the Ammodo Architecture Award for Social Engagement, Machan — Korail Community Platform transforms a former dumping ground into a flexible civic space for gathering, learning and cultural exchange, demonstrating how architecture can emerge through collective knowledge and local participation.

Federica Zambeletti is the founder and managing director of KoozArch, a magazine and creative studio dedicated to architectural discourse, speculative spatial imaginaries, and design research. An architect, researcher, and cultural producer, she explores architecture beyond the built object, using publishing, storytelling, and curating as critical spatial practices. Through KoozArch, she brings together spatial practitioners and thinkers to critically examine the social, political, economic, and ecological dimensions of the built environment, fostering dialogue that contributes to more regenerative and generous futures.