Building Between Systems: Assemblies for Climate Uncertainty
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Dixit-manavi05-march-arch-thesis-2026.pdf
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128.17 MB
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Author(s)
Dixit, Manavi
Advisor(s)
Mazereeuw, Miho
Date Issued
February 2026
Publisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Abstract
Climate change has become a defining force of the twenty-first century, yet its impacts remain profoundly uneven. While global narratives often frame the crisis as universal, vulnerability is shaped by histories of extraction and entrenched socio-political inequalities. Contemporary climate adaptations are highly engineered, capital-intensive, and technologically driven, which serve a privileged few. This raises a critical question: how does the global majority navigate escalating risk and uncertainty under climate change?
Focusing on unrecognized settlements along the Yamuna River floodplain in New Delhi, this thesis documents how communities adapt their homes to extreme heat, monsoons, flooding, humidity, severe cold and pollution. Formed by migrant laborers, these neighborhoods exist within conditions of climate volatility, insecure tenure, and exclusion from formal infrastructure. In response, residents rely on an architecture of “ Jugaad / जुगाड़ (Hindi) / جگاڑ (Urdu)”. A concept of non-conventional, frugal innovation in the Indian subcontinent encompassing inventive fixes, rule-bending solutions, and the creative use of available resources. Through the documentation and analysis of different building techniques across regions and the subcontinent, this research reframes these practices not as temporary improvisations but as collective, knowledge-based systems. It envisions collaborative, community-driven building strategies that are simple, resourceful and functional, that can evolve into robust, engineered solutions through a bottom-up approach to architecture.
Extending this argument, this research advocates for rethinking climate adaptation not as a technical problem to be solved, but as an evolving condition that calls for new architectural vocabularies, aesthetic sensibilities, and frameworks rooted in care, locality, and collective authorship. The work is communicated through accessible public media, such as newspapers and advertisement formats, used not only for representation but as tools for circulation and learning. Through drawings, material inventories, and construction logics embedded within these formats, the thesis positions architectural knowledge as public, transferable, and collective. It ultimately proposes a practice that re-learns, reclaims, and restores agency to vulnerable communities, keeping knowledge open while fostering forms of building that resist extractive systems and sustain local ownership.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture
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