Research Project: Jeeveka Free Transitional Centre

Project Collaborators: Jeevika Free, Kieron Kamal Prasad

Sustainable Development Goals Met (once complete):

During 2018, we undertook a year long research project which culminated in 4 different design schemes and brief making ideas for an educational transition centre for former bonded labourers and their children.

The schemes aim’s were to ease the reintegration of these children and young adults into either mainstream education or paid working life. The project is linked to the long term objectives of Jeevika Free, an NGO based in Karnataka, India; where the development will be located. 30 - 50 children will live on site alongside members of staff and tutors.

Project Overview:

Research and design a facility which provides accommodation and vocational skills training opportunities for between 30 - 50 free’d bonded labourers. The teaching programme will last for 1 year, easing free’d bonded labourers into normal life and work beyond graduating from the centre.

Spaces to include: Classrooms, workshops, recreational spaces, living accommodation, offices, dining hall, storage.

The Stakeholders:

Jeevika Free NGO - Jeevika Free is a charitable organisation based in Karnataka, India. Their charitable aim is to free bonded labourers by implementing the legal system, whilst raising awareness of the cause between existing labourers. Over the past 30 years they have freed more than 30,000 people from bonded labour. Once freed the Jeevika team work to offer self help classes, aiding the freed labourers with the transition into a stable life.

Kolagala Village - A village local to the site which is highly populated with free’d bonded labourers. Many of the people from the village have grown up in or around bonded labour Spending years, decades or even lifetimes in modern slavery, leaving people with little independence and life experience. Upon freedom from this labour people are expected to settle into a “normal“ life, often with no idea what this entails.

CAUKIN Studio - Research, Design, Construction.

The Solution:

The following four schemes and synopsis outline the brief and design outputs from our research. The different schemes vary in scale and focus on different methods of vocational education, rehabilitation and support for free’d bonded labourers back into normal life.

Proposal 1: Between Two Lives - An architecture in support of transitions into independent living.

Proposal 2: Architecture of Jugaad - Repurposing waste material in the state of Karnataka, India.

Proposal 3: Learning Through Building - Growing and working materials in rural India.

Proposal 4: Design + Emergence - Using sport infrastructure to site and support community projects in rural India.

The Issue:

What is bonded labour?

Bonded labour is a form of labour arrangement whereby people are forced to work for long hours and for very little or no wages, without the freedom to seek any other employment until their debt is cleared.

These debts are often fabricated by the owner / slave master through a confusing system of loans and that it is almost impossible to pay off.

This debt then passes down the generations until it becomes paid off, thus bringing extremely young children into the a poor working environment through no fault of their own.

It is most prevalent in rural areas where the agricultural industry relies on local, contracted, and also migrant labourers.

Today, according to The Global Slavery Index, 18,354,700 people in India are estimated to be living in modern slavery.

Between Two Lives - An architecture in support of transitions into independent living.

This scheme focuses on the theme of transition into independent living for individuals going through rapid change. The project defines independent living not only with regards to the home, but also the skills, empowerment and responsibility needed to progress beyond the centre. The programme proposes a cyclical teaching system wherein the students progressively gain responsibility to the point where they become the educators for new students entering the program.

Increased Responsibility > Increased Empowerment > Independent Living

By identifying agriculture as a common skill, the thesis builds upon this knowledge to develop a host of new skills. The implementation of a public food market improves the student’s abilities in: agriculture and farming; food processing; storage and cooking; hospitality and interaction; language skills and cultural awareness; numeracy and literacy and business, finance and management.

The architecture explores how to facilitate this transition both in the masterplan scale as well as the human scale. A central ‘street’ provides a route along the journey whilst simultaneously creating a threshold between structured and unstructured space. ‘The threshold provides the key to the transition and connection between areas with divergent territorial claims and, as a place in its own right, it constitutes, essentially, the special condition for the meeting and dialogue between areas of different orders.’ The buildings change along the route from familiar, intimate, enclosed and secure to informal, public, vibrant and open.

Architecture of Jugaad - Repurposing waste material in the state of Karnataka, India.

With rapid growths in global urbanisation, population and economies, the world’s resources are being put under a huge amount of strain and are rapidly depleting. In architecture, concerns about depleting material and energy sources have largely been centred around the category of ‘sustainability’. With this increasing consumption of resource comes a huge increase in waste production, an issue which is emphasised in developing countries where the technology or waste management procedures are not as developed. India currently produces 23% of the worlds waste yearly, a number which is predicted to grow by 5% per year.

Jugaad is a colloquial Hindi and Punjabi word, which can be roughly translated into an innovative fix, a simple work-around or a solution that bends the rules. It is often used to signify creativity: to make existing things work, or to create new things with meager resources. This thesis explores ways in which architecture and the ‘jugaad’ culture in India can start to tackle the issue of scarcity of resource and waste with interventions of reuse and repurpose.

The ‘Jeevika Free Repurposing Centre’ will become a resource bank for the wider community to build their homes at a lower cost, whilst the on site accommodation becomes a test bed for this process, functioning as a precedent for the wider community. Participants of the educational transitional program will receive training in design, pragmatic thinking, manufacture and construction, enabling a smoother transition back into society.

The Centre aims to achieve a paradigm shift in the perception of waste as a ‘Kuchha’ (temporary or associated with the lowest classes) material to a ‘pukka’ (solid and permanent) material.

Learning Through Building: Growing and working materials in rural India.

“... in 1943, Gandhi told Baker that his knowledge of western architecture would be of very little help in India, where the rural areas needed more attention than the cities. Gandhi gave Baker his idea of building houses, saying that the materials needed to build a house should be acquired from within 5 miles of the site.”

Gandhi’s statement was nothing new, however, with globalisation, these natural resources have been driven further away and have changed our ideology of how to build. In India, the perceptions of timber, earth and brick as being ‘less permanent’ and ‘for poor people’ have driven up the use of concrete and steel, which is often done badly. In response to the works of Laurie Baker on Architecture and The People, Maurice Mitchell’s The Lemonade Stand and Hassan Fathys, Architecture for The Poor, the focus of this proposal is to use the study of locally available materials to change perceptions of said materials and provide aid for three issues within India: bonded labour, pollution and local expansion.

The Centre For Rural Development looks at the use of Timber and Earth as the primary materials. Through reintroducing native Neem timber to the area and the use of Compressed Stabalised Earth Blocks (CSEB), the scheme provides freed bonded labourers an education in construction and local materials, as a catalyst to transition from bonded life into “mainstream” society. The design is predicated on build-ability, and the buildings themselves set a precedent for construction in the area, acting as eye-catching manifestations of the thesis. The design and building process of the centre act as learning tools in construction and design, providing students and the community the knowledge to build suitable buildings, in the process understanding how buildings are informed by climate, sustainably sources local materials, tradition, and technology. In turn students graduating from the school will be able to contribute to the local economy by creating thriving community run, material based businesses, considering embodied energy and able to support local expansion.

Design + Emergence: Using sport infrastructure to site and support community projects in rural India.

Responding at varying levels of architectural agency ‘revealing a socio-economic problem as a motive force for an architectural project’ through scale-suitable interventions. Explored within this proposal is the interaction between an institutionally-funded, national level, cycling facility with more localised co-operative interventions. Naturally the input, role and agency of the architect within these two different spheres of construction will be very different. Displaying a juxtaposition of techniques; oral tradition and tacit knowledge thriving under the umbrella of prefabricated concrete elements. 

This national-level infrastructure, provides a framework in which other stakeholder designers can operate. The different scales of architectural intervention offer support to situations of physical, social and urban transition whilst also responding to wider nationally-routed issues of inclusivity and environmental understanding. Along with leading sociologists and biologists, Nabeel Hamdi summarises that “in nature and in society, patterns are exhibited - where problems are solved by drawing on a variety of information from the multitude of small, relatively simple and local elements…” Following this Fritjof Capra believes that the skilful practitioner understands the “interdependence between design and emergence. They know that in today’s turbulent...environment, the challenge is to find the right balance between the creativity of emergence and the stability of design.”

Underlining this thesis is an open brief put forward by Jeevika Free, a state NGO based in Karnataka, India who work to free bonded labourers. Proposed, is a supporting programme that surrounds a transitional and adaptive educational facility, for cohorts of students anticipating rapid change. The coupling of a national-level velodrome and an active living educational centre responds to both Jeevika’s open brief and the current wider national calls to implement greater rural sporting facilities looking to ‘galvanise the youth’ and ‘encourage them to achieve excellence and adopt healthy lifestyle.’