Indigenising Physical Spaces

Architect, Non-Executive Vice Chairman of Hunnarshala Foundation (India)

For over three decades, Sandeep has been living and working with indigenous communities in Kutch. An environmentalist at heart, he has trained as an architect and worked with communities all over India, building with natural materials and revitalizing their traditional building crafts.

He has set up two institutions – Hunnarshaala Foundation which works on built habitats, and Sahjeevan, has enabled marginalized communities to regenerate and conserve the ecologies and reinvigorate their livelihoods, including conserving traditional water management systems, wild life conservation, pastoralism, organic farming and crop seed conservation. Sahjeevan has set up the Centre for Pastoralism that works through partners in eight states in India and hosts the Living Lightly – Journey’s with Pastoralists exhibition.

Sandeep looks to painting, story-telling, yoga and the fascinating world of insects to fuel his forays at work.

Architect, Co-Founder and Director of Cave_bureau (Kenya)

Stella heads the technical department at Cave, where she orchestrates the seamless coordination of our ideas into built form. She partakes in the Cave_bureau expeditions and surveys into caves within the Great Rift Valley, navigating a return to the limitless curiosity of our early ancestors. She also interrogates the playful and intensive research studies that form part of a broader decoding of the pre and post-colonial African city.

A Kenyan qualified architect since 2009; Stella has worked at Symbion Kenya, Dimensions Architects, and Interior Designers in Kenya. Stella studied at University of Newcastle in Australia where she completed her architectural education, before returning back home to Kenya. She then qualified as an Architect under the Board of Registration of Architects & Quantity Surveyors (BORAQS) and is a member of the Architectural Association of Kenya.

In spring 2025 she will be a Louis I. Khan Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale School of Architecture.

Director – Te Manawahoukura (Aotearoa New Zealand)

Dr Rebecca Kiddle is Ngāti Porou and Ngāpuhi and is Director of the Research Centre, Te Manawahoukura based at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa. With training in urban design (MA and PhD from Oxford Brookes University, UK), her work focuses on Indigeneity in an urban context and in particular the uncovering of Indigenous identities, worldviews and value sets in our homes, streets, public spaces, towns and cities. Her work has focused on the idea of imagining decolonised cities having led a project of the same name with members of the iwi (tribe) Ngāti Toa Rangatira.