In our previous article, Why the New Do-It-Together (DIT) Architecture has Radical Potential, we uncovered a new practice that focuses on ‘we’, not ‘me’; celebrates collaboration, not competition; mobilizes human connections, not transactions.
Yet collaboration with people from different backgrounds, disciplines and social status isn’t always easy as it may seem. In the case of architecture and urban development, design professionals and non-professionals might have entirely different ways of seeing a problem and approaching solutions. For people of different social and professional orientations, it is easy to fail to understand each other’s culture - even if they speak the common language.
In this article, we’d like to illustrate how DIT architecture achieves real impact through cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary collaborations. When professionals and non-professionals collaborate, their overlapping and sometimes even conflicting interests, experiences and knowledge could converge into new sustainable solutions that otherwise would not come into being - such as these two cases in India and the UK.
