Growing houses in a waning economy

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How has environmental displacement and shifting economic conditions reshaped the weavers’ community and its built form over time?

The drawing begins by questioning how a government-planned rehabilitation settlement, conceived as a uniform and stable solution, gradually evolved into an adaptive built fabric. Rather than reading the houses as finished products, they are understood as timelines, where each extension, added floor, or repurposed room registers a response to shifting environmental, economic, and social conditions.

This settlement did not emerge through processes of urban expansion, but through environmental crises. In the early 1990s, repeated cyclones along the Andhra coast displaced weaving communities. What began as a temporary measure of relocation slowly consolidated into a permanent inland settlement.

In 1995, under the N. T. Rama Rao government, the site was formalised as a Shelter and Services Rehabilitation Scheme colony for the Backward Classes – Group B (BC-B) weaving community.Eighty housing plots were laid out on formerly agricultural land acquired from local farmers and allotted equally among five weaving castes—Devang, Senapat, Padmashali, Pathshali, and Kakibathula. Each family received a three-cent plot measuring approximately 12.9 metres by 9 metres.

As weaving shifted fully into the domestic realm and became a year-round occupation, the settlement began to transform incrementally, house by house. Over time, the built fabric came to be shaped less by the original planning framework and more by livelihood practices, labour patterns, and long-term adaptation. Through continuous processes of extension, modification, and reuse, the settlement reveals itself not as a fixed outcome, but as an evolving spatial record of everyday survival and resilience.