New Contextualism: Architecture and Urbanism for People, Place, and Justice

The essay begins from overlapping crises in contemporary cities (ecological fragility, social fragmentation and cultural homogenisation) and argues that Modernism, Postmodernism, placemaking and classic contextualism each left important gaps.

It presents New Contextualism as process-based rather than style-based, with five guiding principles: forward-thinking design, informed by prediction, learning from the past, a broad sense of context, and equity and justice. Every project is described as beginning with three phases (Read, Plan and Process), with particular weight on reading the site through a ten-layer lens.

Case studies include ‘The Flowing Sanctity: From Myth to Matter’ (Panatirtha, Sunamganj), ‘Rejuvenating Kallyanpur Khal’ (Dhaka), ‘Reimagined Jamuna Future Park as a Civic Space’ and the competition entry ‘The Gateway to Tomorrow’. The essay lists works by Frampton, Gehl, Jacobs, Lynch and Relph among its references.