Doctoral Candidate
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Email: nusrat_mim [at] gsd [dot] harvard [dot] edu
Curriculum Vitae Google Scholar
Nusrat Jahan Mim
In rural Bangladeshi domestic context, socially embedded patriarchal practices generate different forms of spatial marginalizations. Ranging from a rural household's spatial arrangements to the speculative development strategies of the rural, gender politics play a significant role in determining women's position in a spatial context. As a part of my ongoing exploration of spatial politics of postcolonial domestic spaces, I visited the Jhenaidah district in the southwestern part of Bangladesh in January 2020. With a group of emerging Bangladeshi, American, and Mexican architects, I participated in a two-day long workshop, organized by the renowned community architecture firm Co.Creation.Architects. Prof Khandakar Hasibul Kabir (BRAC University) and Architect Suheiley Farzana from Co.Creation.Architects helped us to get familiarized with the existing rural kitchen scenarios. In most of the cases, kitchens receive the least attention of the dwellers in terms of construction and maintenance. Although the local women spend a significant amount of their daily lives in these kitchens, these spaces lack basic hygiene and safety facilities. Oftentimes these spaces are used by the male members of the family to store agricultural tools or lightweight vehicles. Since the kitchen spaces receive the least priority in the construction and maintenance endeavors of the household spaces, local women suffer terribly during the monsoon. After documenting the existing conditions of the rural kitchens of Pub Hawe participated with the local women in a brainstorming and bodystorming session with the local women to come up with a desirable solution to their kitchen problem. We documented the ideas that came from the local women and came up with a desirable prototype. Later we developed pseudo kitchen spaces and ran a performative analysis to speculate how that prototype would work in real life.