ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter I examined Hassan Fathy’s mud-brick architecture, finding that while Fathy’s utopian vision is relevant to debates on sustainability today, it retains a reliance on professional expertise, and lacks the social architectures by which dwellers shape habitats for themselves. In this chapter, I focus on the work of the Social Work Research Centre (SWRC), or Barefoot College, a rural campus in Rajasthan, India, built by villagers with no architectural training. The Barefoot College was founded by a group of urban professionals in 1972 to work on water harvesting, but is now a multi-purpose campus for villagers’ education based on Gandhian principles of non-violence, voluntary simplicity, and working with the poorest of the poor so that they may thereby help themselves.
