Chawanad Luansang

Chawanad Luansang has established a model for community-led planning and revitalization that goes beyond housing and land rights to address both structural and social needs. Chawanad is nurturing a new civic culture that empowers local residents with the resource management skills and political experience to address their own short- and long-term community development.

Chawanad and his Openspace collective of community architects have developed a holistic model for long-term rural and urban community revitalization that is driven by the villagers rather than government institutions. Chawanad believes that to solve the problems of poor communities in the long-term, villagers must be empowered to participate in their community revitalization strategies and to take the lead in their formulation. An architect by training, Chawanad begins by mobilizing communities to collectively address housing needs, but leverages this approach to encourage greater community activism. Recognizing that the Thai government’s top-down approaches to community development are frequently rejected by the communities they are designed to serve, Chawanad’s Openspace has demonstrated that the best solutions are those generated at the grassroots level and are supported—not overwritten—by outside technical capacity. This process leaves communities better prepared to manage future development issues such as resource shortages, natural disasters, and other external shocks that may arise in the long-term.

Chawanad saw the need for a participatory community development process as an architecture student. His travels to the countryside as a student leader of community service activities introduced him to the lifestyles of the rural poor. He learned that while these communities were perceived as vulnerable, the government made no effort to assess their needs or abilities when formulating solutions. For instance, when the government sought to relocate a raft-dwelling community outside of Bangkok to improve their living conditions, Chawanad discovered most villagers had no desire to occupy their new housing units. They were not consulted on their development, and felt no ownership of the houses, nor did they perceive them as relevant for their lifestyles.

Thailand’s commitment to achieving the Millennium Development Goals, including Goal 7 on improving the lives of slum dwellers, as well as the rise of populist rural development initiatives in recent government administrations, have contributed to a growing national interest in solving housing problems. However, Chawanad believes the problem lies in the formulation and implementation of a top-down approach with little regard for existing community structures.

Existing government and social institutions formed to address housing and shelter issues tend to stop at relocation or the development of physical structures. While relocation is often necessary for safety or well-being (as for tsunami survivors) and housing is an essential need, both are a means, but not an end, to true community revitalization. Similarly, many institutions work to secure land rights for vulnerable populations, but like relocation, the work is considered complete once those rights are granted. All of these approaches leave communities vulnerable to future resource management problems and other long-term planning issues.

Chawanad believes this area of community development is ignored by existing institutions in Thailand. Communities may be relocated, land rights may be secured, and new houses provided, but how communities respond to the increasing social, political, and economic pressures as they relate to land use, resource management, and local governance, are not addressed. In effect, those invested in the problem are often left out of the creation of a solution. Chawanad’s model fills this gap.

The scope of Chawanad’s work targets rural communities that are removed from the media limelight and citizen organizations (COs) which give more attention to urban slum projects in Bangkok. As a result, Chawanad believes rural communities lack a systemic approach to problem-solving, and that targeting rural communities directly impacts urban slum problems. It is the mismanagement of rural community resources which leads to unfavorable living conditions—driving villagers into city slums.

Chawanad’s experience as a student, practicing architect, and university lecturer, has also led him to discover a problem embedded in the academy; namely, that current architecture education does not address development or social issues within communities. Traditional architecture education tends to focus on urban planning, and serves the urban elite at the expense of rural community development. While there is a small clique of Thai architects working towards socially responsible architecture, none focus on changing the curricula to create change at the academy level.

Chawanad and his colleagues at Openspace help communities build on their base of social capital and material resources to develop concrete problem-solving strategies (e.g. in housing), as well as long-term community capital, such as experience and skills to meet the changing demands of community governance and planning. Chawanad founded Openspace Community Architects in 2007 as a collective of young architects and planners. It works with rural and urban communities through a participatory process designed to address the broad spectrum of community needs, from shelter to livelihoods to resource management solutions.

Chawanad developed Openspace’s strategy to adapt a participatory approach into a scalable model that would empower villagers with the means to sustain their community revitalization long after physical shelters had been built and the architects had gone. He identified vulnerable communities facing impending relocation, and like his pilot community in the tsunami-affected coastal region of southern Thailand, approached those with the most urgent need for intervention that were open to a non-traditional approach.

After the 2004 tsunami, Chawanad was the lead architect on a project funded by the Thai government, Chumchonthai Foundation (CTF), and UNDP. He assisted affected villagers formulate a housing development plan in a small southern island community on Koh Mook in Thailand’s Trang province. Building on his previous experience in implementing participatory processes, including working with local citizens to design community maps and household surveys, as well as plans and housing designs, Chawanad and his team facilitated long-term development plans for resource management based on local wisdom.

Chawanad’s approach begins by working with established leadership structures and engages a broad spectrum—empowering voices often not heard or respected in community forums and significantly changing the dynamics and future of community self-governance. In Koh Mook, several women’s groups developed the analysis and design plans for housing and community spaces. In addition to shelter, community meetings encourage villagers to determine their weaknesses and areas of improvement—such as waste management and water usage. To solve these problems in Koh Mook, rather than bring in unfamiliar, expensive, and hard-to-maintain technology, Chawanad and his team observed and identified existing indigenous methods, and helped the villagers adapt them to the community’s goals. As a result, over two years, the community slowly rebuilt itself from the ground up on newly secured land, divided by the villagers, in houses designed by villagers to meet their lifestyles, and created systems for resource management that continue to sustain the community’s development. Beginning with a directive to provide housing, Chawanad showed the communities how participatory methods and their collective skills could also solve long-term issues.

Using the Koh Mook community as a model, Chawanad’s Openspace Community Architects has documented their process and is expanding to other villages as part of an island-wide plan, with buy-in from an independent government body responsible for developing poor communities called the Community Organization and Development Institute. Chawanad selects communities in need but also those which present new, unique challenges and localized scenarios that will refine his model to ensure it can succeed nationally. As such, Openspace will develop resource and housing management projects from Thailand’s far northern Mae Hong Son and Nan provinces to the southern province of Pattani.

Central to Chawanad’s strategy to change existing patterns is his establishment of Openspace as an interdisciplinary center of knowledge exchange, where people of varying expertise—engineers, architects, artists, filmmakers, and rights advocates—can gather, exchange new ideas, and document best practices for future replication. Openspace rigorously documents every community case in film and print. Chawanad is assembling documentary films from footage he has collected since 2003 to benefit the communities and the next generation of architects and community planners.

Openspace also organizes workshops on issues of interest to organizations, communities, and educational institutions. To address what he feels is a gap in current architectural curricula at the university level, Chawanad is co-authoring a participatory architecture curriculum with a fieldwork component for Walailak University. This is a step towards building a new generation of socially responsible architects instilled with a focus on recognizing the needs of communities and shown how they can use their education and practical experience as architects to empower villagers to manage their future development.

Chawanad has also realized the importance of working with a wide network to further scale his idea. On a local level, he leverages the networks that exist across communities, such as local fishermen’s networks in the south, to ensure that his methods will expand on their own from his pilot communities. But he has also identified relevant international organizations, such as the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights and Nepal’s LUMANTI Support Group for Shelter, with whom he is working to set up a similar group of architects engaged in community revitalization in Kathmandu. This cross-cultural exchange is a way to form groups of like-minded socially responsible architects that will continue to drive lasting change across the region.

Chawanad was born in a city in the southern coastal province of Trang to a family of teachers. As a child, he was considered creative, showing an early interest in art, and also enjoyed spending most of his time outdoors. His parents fostered his interest in social and community issues, bringing him along on weekends to visit the families of their students and to help with student community service activities. These experiences would have a lasting impact, solidifying what would later be a career devoted to community development.

Chawanad left Trang to study at Bangkok’s prestigious Silpakorn University, where he studied architecture. While he knew that engineering was widely seen as a more “practical” course of study, he wanted to remain true to his creativity. He felt that architecture offered a perfect balance of social issues and art, allowing him to exercise his creativity while also making an impact on society. He was also interested in exploring themes across other fields of study and organized a student-led knowledge exchange to bring students and faculty together to learn from each other and share their new ideas. Later elected head of his department by fellow students, he used his position to organize regular community service activities, bringing his fellow architecture students out into rural communities to study their lifestyles and needs.

Upon graduation in 2000, he became a product and interior designer, which brought him across Thailand to identify indigenous products that could be adapted for urban and international markets. However, while in these communities, he found himself more interested in the lifestyles of the people and their interaction with their environment.

The roots of Openspace were planted during Chawanad’s apprenticeship as an architect with Community Architects for Shelter and Environment, an organization that focuses on applying participatory approaches to urban housing planning. This work connected him to a network of established architects, government community planning experts, and land-sharing activists in Thailand, exposing him to the developing field of participatory housing development.

Chawanad’s work in over forty communities throughout Thailand has also helped to establish him as a role model for socially responsible architecture. He has delivered workshops on community development in Vietnam; was selected by Youth Hostel International to travel and study culture and lifestyle in the Himalayas; has been approached to partner with LUMANTI (a Nepali housing development non-profit organization); and has given lectures at universities and social development organizations, as well as for Thailand’s National Housing Authority.