This paper is developed with a growing concern on accessibility issues for winter cities in Nordic context. Much of this knowledge on inclusiveness, universal design and all such efforts in making buildings and public places accessible and usable for everyone are becoming critical for winter conditions especially in the case of northern settlements that are mostly covered with snow and ice for about six to eight months in a year. There is not much of literature available on such concerns of accessibility in winter cities. This paper extends the definition from 'design for all' to design for all in all weather conditions'. The first section of this paper highlights the need to rethink the definition of the concept 'design for all' in the context of all weather conditions. The later part of this paper develops a new integrated and multi-dimensional framework for understanding the accessible built environments for all in all weather conditions. The framework is developed by integrating three different disciplines urban design, social and behavioral studies, and maintenance aspects. Currently this framework is used for conducting empirical case study in small towns in North Sweden.

The focus of creating built environments without recognizing what is appropriate to a particular settlement is a common and frequent failure in many post disaster development projects. This paper has been developed to address the issues related to culture-space dynamics in post tsunami recovery process. Basing on the primary evidences from two fishing villages in Tamilnadu, Southern India, this paper develops key directions for designing culturally responsive and resilient settlements in post disaster contexts in specific to Tamil fishing settlements. This study concludes by highlighting the importance of ‘connectivity’ as a construct of cultural continuity that links approaches for designing built environments with a socio-spatial understanding of traditional settlements in post disaster reconstruction process. Such suggestions can eventually inform the theory and practice about the methodological ways to develop further guidance for designers in the long run.

This paper elaborates on a conceptual framework to validate the argument that cultural dimensions of the affected communities are not effectively and sufficiently addressed in the current post disaster humanitarian and development processes. This has been well articulated in this study from the analysis of shelter reconstruction process in 2004 tsunami hit fishing villages of Tamilnadu. The main contribution of this paper to theory and practice is to introduce a new interdisciplinary framework that is developed to analyse the vulnerability component in the recovery process from a built environment perspective. Firstly, it explains the relevance of the conceptual framework that synthesises two different fields of enquiry i.e. cultural anthropology and urban design to analyse the role of culture in the evolution and development of traditional settlements in post disaster contexts. This is followed by the analysis of reconstruction processes in three tsunami hit fishing villages in Tamilnadu, Southern India, in which the author has carried out primary research as part of his (awarded) PhD study. The analysis of this primary research unfolds the specific impacts and the reasons for such responses in the post tsunami reconstruction process, by comparing and contrasting the findings from the three case studies.

Digital social networks such as Mobile phones have become increasingly important in our daily life in a manner, which has wide range of implications on day to day lifestyles of the people and their livelihoods. Such a revolutionary changes in the lives and livelihoods of the resident inhabitant’s and visitors of the temple have intervened into these historical Temple Streets. Therefore, this paper has been developed with a growing concern on the transformation process in historic temple streets of Srirangam, located in the Tamilnadu, India. Primarily, it reviews an extensive literature and develops a theoretical framework for understanding the transformation of the temple streets in the new digital era. Secondly, it discusses about the findings that were developed from the observations in the field work. This study concludes that even in the digital era physical and virtual world can complement each other to enhance our experience with the digital technology rather than replacing each other.

Various development approaches that have been adapted in the tourism development projects have overlooked the issues of social, political, economic, and cultural and other day to day needs that contribute for sustainable development in the long run. The recent literature on architectural education in architecture schools highlights the limitations and constraints of various tourism concerns, which often isolate the development concerns from its socio-cultural context. Tourism education is considered to be an interdisciplinary subject involving theoretical and practical concerns from various fields such as sociology, planning anthropology, urban design and urban and rural planning and other relevant industries. It is significant especially in the stream of built environment, which is an interdisciplinary subject, has implications for both the consumers and producers: social, political, economic, and cultural. In design education, particularly through the architect’s training in schools there is an absence of concern for designing for stakeholders in the tourist potential areas of the developing world.Therefore, this paper discusses about different attempts in developing participatory teaching methodologies developed for the students of architecture and planning program as a part of academic assignments. This paper argues on how effective the participatory approaches in the architectural education helps in getting a better understanding of the real concerns that are involved in the tourism development projects. Participatory teaching methodology has been adopted with different student groups working on the design process for developing alternative design proposals for the historic towns of Tamilnadu, documentation of Udayaswara village in Madhya Pradesh, India and the study of regional planning of Thimphu region, Bhutan.Srirangam, Rameshwaram and Kanyakumari have been taken as case studies in Tamilnadu for getting a better understanding about the Tourism development issues and community concerns in the Indian historic towns. Udayeswara village has been documented under the guidance of eminent Professor Adam Hardy from Welsh School of Architecture, UK, which students have learnt from an International expertise. Planning students were involved in the study of Thimphu Regional development Plan, in which tourism potential has been explored. After developing a thorough built form analysis, students have developed and further evaluated their design proposals using different participatory methods with the community groups and other stakeholders. The methods include semi-structured interviews with community groups and stakeholders, photographic and video recording, mental maps and discussions with the help of building models. The comparative and combined analysis of the various participatory methodologies highlights the ‘participative approach for design’ as a construct of design thought process that links a positivist approach with a socio-spatial understanding of tourist potential areas in the developing world. This paper concludes upon the learning outcomes of such participatory teaching methodologies that are implemented in various academic programs of School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal. The findings of this comparative study will further inform the better ways to the current design teaching practices in the architectural education, which can effectively help the future built environment professions for understanding the real development issues and community concerns of tourism sector and how these can be sufficiently and effectively addressed by using participatory approaches in the design education.

This paper is developed in built environment context on the premise that integrating cultural aspects in development produces sustainable ways of living for communities affected by natural disasters. It employs a conceptual framework to validate the argument that cultural dimensions of the affected communities are not effectively and sufficiently addressed in the current post disaster humanitarian and development processes. This has been well articulated in this study from the analysis of shelter reconstruction process in 2004 tsunami hit fishing villages of Tamilnadu, Southern India, in which the author has carried out primary research as part of his PhD study. This paper discusses the disaster reconstruction process in two different ways. Firstly, Instrumentally - in a positivist way. Secondly, the findings on the outcome of the reconstruction process have been discussed from the perspective of cultural anthropology. It concludes by highlighting the importance of ‘connectivity’ as a construct of culture that links a positivist approach with a socio-spatial understanding of traditional settlements in post disaster reconstruction process.

This paper concerns post disaster reconstruction in the context of developingcountries, taking the tsunami reconstruction in Tamilnadu, Southern India as its case study. It looks at how current post disaster recovery processes interfere with pre disaster development processes and increase the vulnerability of affected settlements. It employs a conceptual framework to validate the argument that cultural dimensions of the affected communities are not effectively and sufficiently addressed in the current post disaster humanitarian and development processes. Firstly it explains the relevance of the conceptual framework that synthesises two different fields of enquiry i.e. cultural geography and morphology to analyse the role of culture in the evolution and development of traditional settlements in post disaster contexts. This is followed by the analysis of reconstruction processes in three tsunami hit fishing villages inTamilnadu, Southern India, in which the author has carried out primary research as part of his PhD study. Finally it concludes the impacts of such reconstruction process and their causes identified from this primary study.

The explosive growth of computing media solutions has created new challenges in the built environment research. In the recent decade, researchers from diverse interests have been employing combination of video surveillance techniques and physical computing methods to understand social behavioural patterns in built environment research. This paper is developed on the research issues that constraint the use of video analytical techniques in built environment research. This paper is composed of three parts. The first part gives a description on how video analysis helps to investigate qualitative dimensions in built environment research. The second part is developed with the explanation of two different cases, in which authors have deployed video techniques in their individual research dissertation projects for understanding the social behaviours of space. In the first case, video data is collected without the consent of targeted audience in a given space and thus analysed using physical computing methods in order to understand the interactive quality of that space. The second case describes how video techniques were adapted to understand the role of culture in post disaster contexts with the consent of the target group. The final part critically analyses the above described two cases in order to identify the issues that limit or constraint the adaptation of video approaches for built environment research. It concludes various issues and possible recommendations to encourage and further qualify video research methods in the built environment context.

This paper is developed from the primary research, the author carried out in one of the tsunami hit fishing villages in Southern Tamilnadu, India as part of his PhD research. It explains in detail, mainly about the underlying cultural dimension that is often gets ignored in the light of more pressing needs in both the disasters themselves and development context as a whole. It further elaborates on how people attempt to adapt to the change, by giving meanings and logics to qualify, for instance the disqualified socio-spatial spaces to accommodate their local needs. Through a detail assessment of this empirical casestudy, it also proposes that there is need for integrating strategies to interface between local cultural needs and the existing post tsunami development process.