NEWS
May 21, 2024
Naidu Janardhan, a leader in community-led design and sustainable architecture, will be in residence at the College of Environmental Design during the fall 2024 semester.
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The College of Environmental Design is excited to announce that Sandhya Naidu Janardhan is the recipient of the 2024–2025 Berkeley Rupp Prize.
Naidu Janardhan is an architect and advocate of community-led social impact design and sustainable architecture. Her work focuses on cultivating processes that provide marginalized communities with the agency to choose where and how they live, work, and play.
She is the founder and managing director of Mumbai-based Community Design Agency, an interdisciplinary organization that brings together researchers, architects, engineers, business professionals, planners, and artists to work directly with disenfranchised communities. The organization's work includes the Sanjaynagar Slum Redevelopment project, the Govandi Arts Festival, and Niramay Place.
Berkeley Rupp Prize recognizes Naidu Janardhan’s practice of community-engaged design
The biannual Berkeley Rupp Prize is a $100,000 award that provides recognition and support of the special values that women bring to the built environment. This honor is given to a distinguished design practitioner or academic who has made a significant contribution and commitment to architecture in the areas of gender equity; environmentally sensitive use of resources; community; Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI); and/or innovation in their body of work.
A residency at CED, which includes opportunities for teaching, public lectures, and creative scholarship, is intended to provide Berkeley Rupp Prize awardees with inspiration and time for reflection that may inform future contributions to the profession. The Berkeley Rupp Prize is made possible through a generous bequest to the campus by architect Sigrid Lorenzen Rupp (BArch 1966).
The nominating committee selected Naidu Janardhan from a strong pool of invited candidates. They were impressed with her leadership in the area of social-impact design and notable contributions to underserved and underrepresented communities. They believe that her impact on Berkeley students will be transformational: Naidu Janardhan models true community-engaged design and the role of the designer as a facilitator.
“We are looking forward to the ways Sandhya’s work will contribute to discourses in the college about alternative forms of professional practice. While community-based practices are necessarily local, an understanding of the breadth, goals, and outcomes will inspire our students as they move into the world,” says William W. Wurster Dean Renee Y. Chow.
Naidu Janardhan is the sixth recipient of the prize, which was last awarded to architect and landscape architect Sierra Bainbridge in 2023. During the fall 2024 semester, she will teach a seminar focused on conceptualizing inclusive futures within the built environment as the demands of climate change and forced migration grow.
“A recognition of this nature for a practice from the Global South brings to light the significance and foundational role of the built environment, which is often overlooked in creating equitable communities. This will no doubt have a catalyzing effect on our work and impact,” says Naidu Janardhan.
An inclusive and purpose-driven approach to architecture
Naidu Janardhan received her undergraduate degree in architecture from RV School of Architecture, Bangalore, then went on to graduate from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Throughout her formal training, she encountered a pedagogy that rarely viewed the architect as part of a larger community. As she observed that nearly 90% of the world’s buildings were being built without architects, she questioned the profession’s role in furthering equity and justice for those on the margins.
Her commitment to gender equity and social justice stems in part from her background. Born and raised in a conservative South Indian family, Naidu Janardhan is the first professional working woman in her family. “My upbringing and experiences have allowed me to understand the challenges that women face, that they often aren’t allowed to have a voice,” she says.
After graduating from Columbia, Naidu Janardhan moved to San Francisco, where she began working with Architecture for Humanity. The nonprofit, which sought architectural solutions to humanitarian crises, led her to work in Haiti on post-disaster reconstruction.
This first professional experience helped her realize the power and potential of design and architecture, and prompted her to challenge conventional ways of thinking about architects. Her body of work has since been about bringing in people usually excluded from the design process.
CDA: Designing with disenfranchised communities
After having spent a decade abroad, Naidu Janardhan returned to India to work alongside spatially marginalized communities in Mumbai. “I spent the first few months in the nonprofit ecosystem here, the ones who are providing social services to slum dwellers, to people living on the pavement — really working with disenfranchised communities,” she says. “This helped deepen my insights into the impact that spatial inequality has on the urban poor.”
Naidu Janardhan founded Community Design Agency to initiate projects that truly work for the disenfranchised. One the first CDA took on, an ongoing slum redevelopment project, is establishing benchmarks for low-income community housing in India. Located in Sanjaynagar, in a small city northwest of Mumbai, it provides safe, climate-resilient housing for 298 families.
Naidu Janardhan’s involvement with the community made it clear that any project in Sanjaynagar would require her to move beyond the traditional role of the architect. As she learned more about the residents, she saw that any potential development would have to be conscious of more than architectural needs: it would need to consider gender, livelihood issues, health, education, and recreation.
In developing a plan, the residents were involved in every aspect of the process, from building design to maintenance. The community decided to go ahead with eight three-story buildings organized around courtyards of varying sizes, with rooftop gardens, a community health center, and a childhood development center. To address intensifying heatwaves in the region, the building design uses passive ventilation systems and wide corridors that ensure better air flow.
CDA also innovated a new financial model for Sanjaynagar. Recognizing the gap in housing finance access for lower-income groups, CDA partnered with a social peer-to-peer lending institution to create a customized, low-interest loan product for residents.
Collective action addresses the unique needs of a community
Another community where Naidu Janardhan and her team brought their place-based process, and where it is proving to be successful, Natwar Parekh, Govandi.
CDA is collaborating with the residents of this sprawling vertical public housing complex to revitalize their neighborhood, one of the most marginalized and polluted in Mumbai. Together, their work has reclaimed public spaces, set up collectives for women and youth nurturing grassroots leadership, evolved local governance mechanisms, and built a children’s library.
The first-ever community-led Govandi Arts Festival was held in 2023 as a celebration of the spirit of the neighborhood, which redefined ideas of home and belonging for residents.
Bridging participatory design practice and academia
During her tenure as the Berkeley Rupp Prize awardee, Naidu Janardhan will invite CED students to research ways they can apply participatory design to their own communities. They will investigate how social design practice can be used to address societal issues.
“Berkeley is a place that attracts students and professors from different cultures, different countries. There are so many people working to understand diverse communities and how they occupy cities. So I think it's a great space as a practitioner to take participatory design into an academic setting and explore it as a topic of inquiry, and critique it,” she says.
Naidu Janardhan models true community-engaged design and the role of the designer as a facilitator.
Naidu Janardhan expects to face some difficulties bringing participatory design into academia. For one, the term “slum” carries different connotations in the U.S. than it does in India. “What we’re challenging is this idea that slums are places without any kind of strength or any kind of culture,” she says. “Our very premise is that slums are inherently resilient communities.”
Using case studies from her work with marginalized communities, Naidu Janardhan plans to co-create methodologies with her students that improve equity through spatial interventions. Students will explore how these processes can evolve further, and be contextualized, based on their lived experiences and academic backgrounds. In the spirit of her work, the course will be centered around the wisdom of marginalized communities and students will hear directly from many of the community leaders she works with.
Naidu Janardhan looks forward not only to collaborating with her students at Berkeley, but to what the Berkeley Rupp Prize will make possible for the communities she works with.
“As a studio, and as a practitioner, being recognized by a prestigious university like UC Berkeley is going to go a long way in providing a platform for the work we’re doing in Mumbai. It’s going to matter in terms of bringing resources into our communities,” she says.
The public will have a chance to hear from Naidu Janardhan at the Berkeley Rupp Prize Lecture on November 13.
