Inclusive Sustainability and its Social Dimensions

Sustainability is often venerated as an unquestionable virtue, its varied meanings taken for granted. This is problematic. Rarely do we ask the more uncomfortable question: whose sustainability are we talking about? In much of the built environment the term is applied loosely, selectively, and framed through metrics that prioritise materials, energy performance, or aesthetics while sidestepping the social realities that shape how people live, work, and inhabit space. A project may score high on environmental credentials, yet remains indifferent to the very communities it claims to serve.

This selective lens produces a troubling paradox: developments celebrated as “sustainable” can still displace informal settlements, exclude low-income groups, or overlook the rights and welfare of construction workers who make the architecture possible. It is here that the discipline must confront an essential truth — a project cannot be called sustainable if it deepens social inequity, regardless of how green its materials may be.

Goal 11 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals attempts to address this gap by anchoring sustainability in inclusivity and participatory urbanisation. Yet in India and Bangladesh, inequitable development patterns persist where planning often reinforces existing power structures rather than redistributing opportunity. If environmental strategies are foregrounded while social ones remain peripheral, the result is only a partial sustainability: climatically proficient, but socially hollow.

True sustainability demands a broader frame. It requires understanding construction as a social act that impacts multiple stakeholders at every stage: who benefits, who is excluded, who gains agency, and who bears the costs. It asks whether the worker on site has access to safety and dignity, whether the informal vendor displaced by a public project finds a place in the new urban order, whether communities are co-authors rather than afterthoughts.

The cases that follow — ranging from small modular interventions to neighbourhood-scale redevelopment and community-led environmental restoration — demonstrate how social sustainability can be embedded across scales. Together, they argue for a holistic, justice-oriented approach in which sustainability is not a label but a lived practice, grounded in equity, participation, and shared agency.

Small Interventions

Modular Approach: Designing (In)Constant Infrastructures by Chaal.Chaal.Agency

Street vending, once integral to Indian cities, has steadily diminished under the rise of e-commerce and large retail chains. Yet its essence remains inherently sustainable: minimal energy use, low waste, local economies, and livelihoods for some of the city’s most marginalised groups.

Chaal.Chaal.Agency re-examines this overlooked urban infrastructure through (In)Constant Infrastructures, a collaboration with the Sathwara women of Bhuj. Together, they developed modular street carts that respond to climatic stress, ergonomic strain, and financial uncertainty. Each prototype, named in Gujarati, embodies a different scale of support: Nano eases head-load carrying with compartments and a resting surface; Vachlo adds steering, shade, and storage; and Motto transforms the cart into a multi-level display to optimise tight street spaces.

Lightweight and repairable, the designs draw from local materials and craft to extend resilience through mobility and reuse. By enabling livelihoods and enhancing public space, they reveal how inclusive sustainability can begin with something as ordinary, and as vital, as the street corner.

Prototype Approach: Khudi Bari by Marina Tabassum Architects

In Bangladesh’s riverine regions, where annual floods and erosion continually reshape the land, housing becomes a negotiation with water. Within this shifting terrain, Marina Tabassum Architects developed Khudi Bari (meaning ‘small house’), a lightweight modular dwelling designed for communities living along the Padma, Jamuna, and Meghna rivers.

Drawing from vernacular practice, the structure is built to be assembled, dismantled, and relocated as conditions change. Made from bamboo, corrugated metal, and simple steel joints, it can be put together by three people using basic tools. The two-storey frame provides elevated refuge during floods while supporting everyday routines; the upper level, particularly valued by residents, offers safety, as well as a rare viewpoint across the river landscape. Priced at roughly $500 (₹42,000), it relies on locally sourced materials to keep costs low and livelihoods local.

A project may score high on environmental credentials, yet remains indifferent to the very communities it claims to serve

At the heart of the project is participation. Through workshops, mapping sessions, and model-making, residents learn to build, modify, and extend their own homes. Many have already adapted the design adding kitchens, storage and shaded verandas, demonstrating how flexibility fosters ownership.

Khudi Bari shows how architecture can work with dynamic landscapes through dignity and adaptability, strengthening resilience not only through materials but through shared knowledge and collective capacity.

Building-Level Interventions

Community-Centric Approach: Paani Community Centre, Rajarhat, Bangladesh

As the scale shifts from individual to communal, the Paani Community Centre in Rajarhat, Bangladesh, illustrates how buildings can anchor collective agency, positioning sustainability as an outcome of participation and co-creation.

Conceived through a pro bono collaboration between architects and residents, Paani blends professional expertise with local skill to create a space that functions as both school and neighbourhood hub. Its design is grounded in cultural context and shaped by environmental and economic considerations.

Construction relied on accessible techniques and locally sourced materials — bamboo, handmade brick, mango wood, reused steel, and recycled panels. U-shaped brick columns on the south facade frame slender vertical windows that draw in light and air while reducing heat gain. Bamboo and thin concrete slabs minimise the need for timber and keep costs manageable. With nearly all construction carried out manually, the process generated employment and kept energy use low.

What defines Paani is its ongoing life within the community. Built and maintained by residents, the centre operates as a shared space of learning and livelihood. Workshops held inside produce bamboo bicycles that support maintenance and local income. Here, sustainability grows through relationships, through people building, using, and caring for the space together.

Paani shows how architecture, when shaped through collaboration, can strengthen the bond between people and place.

Adaptive Reuse

Talaricheruvu Rural School, Andhra Pradesh (India), by CollectiveProject

The Talaricheruvu Rural School in Andhra Pradesh explores bamboo within a different landscape. Set in an industrial hinterland, it transforms a harsh, arid site into a place of comfort and curiosity through thoughtful adaptation and reuse.

The project, commissioned by the Penna Foundation as a prototype for India’s industrial hinterlands, began with a 15-year-old L-shaped structure. Though structurally sound, it was inhospitable: oversized classrooms with poor ventilation, distant toilets, and no shade for children enduring temperatures above 43°C. Rather than replace, CollectiveProject chose adaptive reuse. Jali (meaning ‘netted’) screens and new openings brought daylight and cross-ventilation; reconfigured interiors expanded capacity to 24 classrooms, with labs, libraries and faculty lounges that dignified both teaching and learning.

A series of independent pavilions — kitchen, cafeteria, preschool, art room — are gathered beneath a vast bamboo canopy supported by a branching metal frame. Made from 12,000 locally sourced poles, the canopy filters heat and wind, turning abandoned courtyards into shaded commons for play, gathering, and open-air classes. Dappled light softens the industrial setting, recasting the campus as a landscape of discovery.

Lightweight and repairable, the designs draw from local materials and craft to extend resilience through mobility and reuse

Material choices reinforce this ethos of economy and context: Kadappa limestone flooring reclaimed from quarry waste, a cement wash sourced from the adjacent factory, and gentle palettes of pinks, greens and blues that soften the industrial setting. Construction, spread over six years, became an act of social sustainability — executed while the school remained active, it engaged and upskilled workers from nearby villages under factory engineers’ guidance.

Talaricheruvu demonstrates how adaptive reuse and climate-sensitive design can do more than create functional enclosures. By reshaping a severe environment into one of shade and care, the school turns education into an experience of dignity and delight.

Urban-Scale Interventions

Participatory Redevelopment: Sanjaynagar Slum Redevelopment, Ahmednagar  (Maharashtra), by Community Design Agency

Where Paani and Talaricheruvu address community needs at the scale of the building, the Sanjaynagar project in Ahmednagar extends similar principles across an entire neighbourhood. Here, sustainability emerges through social infrastructure, shared decision-making, and financial inclusion — shaping the lives of 298 families from 22 communities living within two acres.

Led by Community Design Agency with the Ahmednagar Municipal Corporation and local non-profit Snehalaya, the project reimagines low-income housing as an exercise in empowerment. Instead of maximising unit counts, it begins with the premise that equitable housing is built around community, not just constructed dwellings.

The masterplan arranges homes into eight ground-plus-two clusters around shared courtyards, retaining existing social ties while introducing spaces for recreation and everyday interaction. Wide, naturally lit corridors act as informal commons, and bamboo screens and pergolas offer shade. Construction methods respond to local soil and climate through load-bearing masonry and vernacular slab systems.

Participation shaped every stage — from neighbourhood layout to individual home choices — through workshops and on-site model making. The funding structure mirrored this collective approach, combining Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana support, municipal land, resident investment, and philanthropic contributions. Crucially, a new financial inclusion model opened access to credit for families previously outside formal banking, enabling first-time homeownership.

Sanjaynagar demonstrates how participatory design can reframe urban redevelopment as a collective act of resilience. By aligning social, spatial, and financial systems, it transforms housing into an architecture of belonging — proof that sustainability at the city scale begins with the community itself.

Urban River Space (Debdaru Chattar), Jhenaidah (Bangladesh), by Co-Creation Architects

In Khudi Bari, architecture met water as an intimate, adaptive force — one that shaped shelter and survival along Bangladesh’s shifting rivers. In Jhenaidah, that same relationship unfolds at the scale of the city. The Urban River Spaces project along the Nobogonga River transforms water from a boundary into a shared ground, renewing people’s connection with their landscape through collective design.

Across South Asia, rapid urbanisation has often distanced cities from their rivers, eroding the ecological and social bonds that once defined them. Here, the architects Khandaker Hasibul Kabir and Suhailey Farzana sought to reverse that drift. Through years of participatory engagement, they worked with residents to reclaim the riverbank as a democratic commons: an accessible, inclusive space where ecology and daily life coexist.

The 115-metre-long Debdaru Chattar, the city’s main public ghat, unfolds across two plateaus linked by steps and a ramp, while the smaller Shatbariya Ghat nearby supports bathing, rituals, and informal gatherings. Built from locally available brick and concrete by community masons, the interventions reconnect the river to the rhythms of public life. Shaded by mature trees and animated by children, vendors, and neighbours, the ghats now host recreation, festivals, and everyday exchanges.

At the urban scale, Debdaru Chattar rebalances Jhenaidah’s growth by turning attention back to the water it once overlooked. It shows how design can bridge environmental and social systems making sustainability a lived, shared experience.

Knowledge Sharing and Capacity Building

METI School, Rudrapur (Bangladesh), by Anna Heringer Architecture

Inclusive sustainability requires not only building physical structures but also transferring knowledge and skills that enable communities to shape their own futures. The METI School in Rudrapur, Bangladesh, designed by Anna Heringer, embeds this principle directly into construction, making building itself an act of education.

Instead of replacing local earth-and-bamboo traditions, the project improved them. Twenty-five local labourers were trained in enhanced techniques — foundations, damp-proofing, load-bearing cob walls, and bamboo framing — ensuring the methods remained accessible and replicable. The process shifted perceptions from “weak mud houses” to durable, climate-appropriate construction.

Workers gained confidence in measurement, structural stability, and material use, while foreign collaborators learned from local knowledge, including time-tested earth-mixing practices. Children participated too, experiencing sustainable building firsthand.

By using local materials and keeping the budget within the village, METI strengthened the local economy and reinforced regional identity. The project shows how capacity building becomes social sustainability: empowering communities, extending the life of vernacular techniques, and supporting better living conditions without dependence on external systems.

ShramA Initiative by Ethos Foundation in collaboration with Saint-Gobain

The METI School illustrates how construction can build local capacity; ShramA (Shramik Action) turns this relationship around. It begins by recognising that construction workers already hold deep reservoirs of knowledge — skills refined over years of practice, traditional techniques carried across regions, and an intuitive understanding of materials. ShramA, an umbrella initiative by the Ethos Foundation in collaboration with Saint-Gobain, Indian Institute of Architects, and Lucknow Architects Association, brings this expertise to the centre of India’s construction discourse, addressing long-standing inequities by giving agency to the people who shape our built environment.

Under ShramA, Project Inclusion, Project Dignity, and Project Empowerment operate as interconnected pathways.

Project Inclusion partners with architecture colleges across western India to document workers’ lives and labour conditions through ethnographic research. The findings — on wage insecurity, gender disparities, and limited awareness of rights — form the groundwork for more equitable industry practices.

Project Dignity documents workers’ craft through short, accessible videos that showcase construction knowledge rarely acknowledged in formal frameworks, making their expertise visible and valued.

Project Empowerment builds on these insights through training sessions, financial-literacy workshops, and skill-building engagements that support workers’ aspirations. These have travelled across multiple cities, bringing together workers, students, and professionals in shared learning environments.

ShramA demonstrates that inclusive sustainability extends beyond the built object — it requires recognising and supporting the people who make architecture possible, ensuring that equity begins with those who build.

Conclusion

As David Harvey reminds us, spatial systems are never neutral. They mirror the inequities, hierarchies, and aspirations of the societies that shape them. When viewed through this lens, sustainability is not only an environmental mandate but a social one — an obligation to design spaces that redistribute opportunity, support dignity, and expand agency.

The cases in this article show that such an approach is neither abstract nor idealistic. It emerges in the modular resilience of Khudi Bari, the collaborative ethos of the Paani Community Centre, the adaptive intelligence of Talaricheruvu, the neighbourhood-scale participation in Sanjaynagar, the renewed civic life along Jhenaidah’s riverfront, and the embedded knowledge systems strengthened through METI and ShramA. Across these examples, the thread is unmistakable: social justice is a design tool, not an afterthought.

Embedding equity, access, participation, and rights into the act of building — at scales from a single cart to a neighbourhood, creates outcomes greater than the sum of their parts. It transforms interventions into systems of care, turning buildings into anchors of collective agency and cities into more humane, resilient landscapes.

Inclusive sustainability, then, is not a discrete strategy but a natural way of building — one that recognises people as co-authors of the environments they inhabit. When designers work with this clarity, spatial systems begin to shift. They move from reflecting inequity to actively redistributing possibility. And in that shift lies the most powerful form of climate and social resilience we can build.

References: 

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