Tipping the balance : integrative dairy farming for sustainable rural living

Abstract

The developing world is currently witnessing a great ‘final migration’ of rural to urban. It is a necessary and inevitable trend, yet failures of urban planning and political consideration result in diminishing opportunities for rural migrants. Activist architecture that attempts to deal with these problems is often focused on the physical manifestation of the failures of this arrival process: the urban slum.

By investigating the rural cause of migration, rather than the urban symptom, this project aims to complement the architectural work being done in cities, reducing the need for migration through the creation of a bottom-up, small-hold, least industrialised collective farm that eases the transition from customary agricultural methods to higher levels of productivity. The project consists of a planning system and an architectural system for designing and building integrative dairy farms that are intended to increase self-reliance, economic opportunities and upward mobility in rural areas while providing for the increasing food demand of the urban environment as it expands. Within the farm, emphasis is placed on the design of the workers living units and lifestyle, to prioritise upskilling and empowerment of lower caste workers. In order to address the scale of the demand in India, this new model is constructed as an adaptable framework to aid management and to provide potential infrastructure upgrades of the local rural area, while containing enough flexibility to suit the specificity of diverse rural communities.

Project site: East of Khurampur Village, Sonipat, Haryana, India.