Abstract
Economic concerns, migration challenges, and the climate emergency, are pressing international agenda items. Intense human activity is central to these themes, and progressively changes Planet Earth, affecting localities worldwide. A primary way in which the age of humans, the Anthropocene, evidences itself is via the fast-evolving built environment in the Global South, which is the focus of this paper. With increasing international concerns about planetary futures, change affecting ‘top-down’ knowledge is often linear, featuring established and measurable dimensions. Transposed worldviews can however come into conflict with commitments to localism, and run counter to encouraging local knowledges and systems, key themes in a de-colonializing world. In Nepal, during the post-2015 earthquake residential reconstruction, a tension arose between ‘Owner Driven Construction’ strategies associated with INGO/NGO/Government of Nepal actors (focus on local agency), and ‘Build Back Better’, similarly promoted, which was mainly interpreted mono-dimensionally as ‘Build Back Safer’ by engineers and population facing implementing partners. Post-occupation, new knowledge from householders about the occupant experience of any house/home becomes available. Drawing on data from participant and context focussed fieldwork in Gorkha (Nepal), this paper sheds light on local insights related to building design and occupation stages. Tensions between qualities associated with the traditional housing stock and aspirational futures emerge, and a complex web of values, assumptions, and meanings associated with a home come to the forefront. Data evaluation supports the view that the most sustainable and holistic solutions for householders occur where co-comprehension of bottom-up and top-down knowledge is practiced, leading to co-creation.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
PlanetaryFutures, KnowledgeManagement, Recovery, GlobalSouth, HouseAndHome, Nepal
