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MDPI Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute

The global discourse around architecture education emphasizes rethinking curricula for engaging more with social issues. The shift from creating star architects to socially responsive professionals necessitates examining different approaches to build skills, especially in the design studio, for encouraging a comprehensive system of inquiry for developing design solutions. In Jhenaidah, a secondary city in Bangladesh, fourth-year students participated in a design studio that tried to address critical urban issues and to generate design ideas using field research and community participation. This paper shares the experience of facilitating the design studio. The learning process and studio structure included exploration, examination, consultations, mapping, vision development and strategic planning for arriving at specific design proposals. The experience of working with a local government institution was an added learning of the studio. Pedagogical exploration from the studio reiterates the arguments for balancing rationalism and social responsiveness with creativity in architecture design studios.

Disasters have a direct and acquit effect on human lives and settlement. Assessment of natural movement in the high dense settlements becomes a crucial issue in terms of disaster management. Evacuation, as an intuitive and practically effective emergency rescue measure, has long been used and is expected to be enhanced to protect human populations against hazardous situations caused by these natural and man-made disasters. A well-defined and manageable plan is one of the prerequisites for successful implementation of an emergency evacuation is a life saving measure on disaster events. Haphazard urban growth in old Dhaka and increasing industrial load on specialized industrial zones like Dhaka export processing zone is an alarming marker for disaster preparedness for the city. As lacking in proper disaster management process, emergency evacuation system developed not so far. In the methodology, investigation has done through Michael Patton’s Utilization Focused Evaluation Model. The measurement and assessment of the effectiveness is based on three dimensional analyses: Consumers contentment Index, Public stuffs index and Collective worth. Considering the present situation, and is undertaken with different objectives of analyzing the existing emergency evacuation system of old Dhaka and DEPZ area. In the virtual effectiveness analysis, user satisfaction indexes/ Consumers contentment index (C.C.I.) score is 41, 47 and 45(out of 100) for Industrial, household and others respectively and Public Stuffs Index for industrial unit is 33, for Households Unit is 44.55 and for others unit is 48.72. All these score indicates the poor level of Emergency Evacuation Service of Old Dhaka and DEPZ. The study examine service level of present emergency support system, which are prominent variable to develop an effective emergency evacuation plan to reduce hazard impact on specific area.

Critical climate stress moments may be defined as those moments when households, communities, and their livelihood systems are vulnerable to climate related risks and hazards. This working paper examines critical climate stress moments due to specific climatic and biophysical causes experienced by the people in the Teesta River basin in India and Bangladesh. The Teesta, like other river basins of the Himalaya, has a fragile geology, as well as complex climate, ecosystems and socio-economic conditions. Critical moments can serve as a tool for communicating vulnerabilities and the challenges to sustainable lives and livelihoods, and to link vulnerability assessments with adaptation policy and action.

Access to land is very important for socially and economically disadvantaged people, from the countries where agriculture is the main source of employment to improve their livelihoods. It brings an opportunity for producing their livelihoods reducing extreme poverty. Land management is a tool being employed by governments around the world to contribute in this respect. In Bangladesh, guchchogram/ cluster village projects are done for rehabilitating rural land less people to reduce poverty. Successful implementation of such projects will help in reducing poverty, migration and improving socio-economic condition of the rural poor. This paper focuses on evaluating cluster village projects whether they are improving the socio-economic status of the people.

This article explores how the asset-based community development approach has improved the living conditions of the urban slum communities and have also addressed the house level poverty through direct asset transfer that can have positive co-benefits for community resilience to climate change. A broader and less restrictive design, which is qualitative in nature, has been adopted to produce arguments using the experiences of the members of Community Development Committees (CDCs) of slums of Khulna city. Considering the great flexibility nature of open-ended interview data, thematic analysis has been applied to identify and interpret the patterns (themes) related to the activities of CDCs. The findings of the aggregated thematic data show that while community-driven actions might not be taken with climate change adaptation specifically in mind, local community-based actions initiated by the CDCs of slums such as community-driven slum upgrading and collective savings schemes to reduce asset erosion directly contribute to broader resilience to climate change, by reducing exposure to climatic risk and also addressing internal drivers of vulnerability. The findings of capacity-decision-making matrix show that the CDC members do not possess equal capacity while managing the vulnerability through transferring the asset both at household and community level.