SKDO’s Principal Architect, Shreya Krishnan, was part of the first place winning team for the Entekochi Urban Design Competition organised by Deutsche Gesellenschaft fur Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GiZ), Kochi Municipal Corporation and Kochi Collective, where she led the development of community-based toolkits and design strategies within the larger framework of “ADAPT+CONNECT+EMPOWER,” a toolkit-based approach to generate site-specific and contextual design interventions to address key issues along the Mullasery canal in Kochi.

In this case, we understood solid waste management along the canal as a proxy for several civic issues. Through the EMPOWER toolkit, we have addressed ways to mobilise communities to push back against the problems that plague the canal in its current form. . The primary purpose of the community-centric toolkit is: to inform and engage all stakeholders, collaborate with stakeholders to formulate community-led solutions, and provide instrumental support in the form of funding, agency and capacity building. Each of these four strategies play out at three scales: the household, neighbourhood, and city scale to create lasting systemic change.