What can a remote fishing village teach us about belonging, resilience, and community-led placemaking? In Ramin, on Iran’s Indian Ocean coast, a community library and the country’s only surf club have transformed books, waves, local knowledge, and women’s participation into powerful resources for social change.
This hands-on workshop introduces participants to Mardumshahr, an asset-based, bottom-up co-creation methodology tested in more than 120 communities across Iran. Through an immersive encounter with sounds, images, and objects from Baluchestan, participants will explore Ramin’s social, cultural, natural, and spatial assets. They will then work collaboratively to create a relational asset map and develop a spatial design concept and initial branding direction for the community.
Participants will learn to identify overlooked local assets, turn community stories into spatial ideas, and facilitate co-design in contexts shaped by exclusion, limited resources, and contested access to public space. The session will also create a practitioner network based on concrete commitments and shared learning.
Join us to experience placemaking not as the delivery of solutions but as the collective discovery of what a place already holds.
The speakers:- Sina Ataee
- Seyed Loghman Hosseini
- Aytan Huseynli
The project team members:- Easkey Britton
- João Zamith
- Nafiseh Babaei
- Farzaneh Abedian Aval
- Navid Falahat
- Seyedali Fazelhashemi
- Afshin Firoozian
