Reflections

What we learned in making this book

This book was made by thirty-one people in three groups, and most of what we learned came from that. Each group knew its own island well. Making one book meant agreeing how to describe all three in the same way.

We learned that a shared method has to be written down. One toolkit, used the same way on every island, is what made the theme comparisons possible. Where a group had counted or scored differently, the comparison page showed it at once, and we went back to the data.

We learned to check our own numbers. A figure on an island page had to match the same figure on its comparison page, and more than once it did not. Finding out why taught us more about the data than collecting it had.

We learned that a reader is not a studio critic. Pages that made sense to us were full of codes, abbreviations and unlabelled charts. Rewriting them for someone who has never seen the site made our own argument clearer.

We learned what a template is for. Agreeing early on one typeface, a few text styles, one colour for each island and one header for every page cost time at the start and saved it every week after. A tracker that named one person for each page did the same for the work itself.

And we learned to say what we do not know. Where the census stopped short of a neighbourhood we estimated, and marked the estimate. The three masterplans in this book are proposals, not answers. The plots each of us designs next will test them.

Most of all, the islands taught us one thing. The same toolkit, used on an old island, a resettled one and a planned one, found people staying where a street is shaded, calm and open to them, whatever the density or the age of the place. Design decided it. That is what the three masterplans act on.

The Sem VI 2026 studio

Malé

A reflection from the group leader

Before this study, Malé was just the place I live: crowded, loud, too familiar to notice. Counting changed that. Nearly ten hectares of the city’s best edge belong to cargo and warehouses. Behind them, the old neighbourhood where people once knew each other by name has become a concrete jungle, with neighbours stacked above one another who rarely meet. The hardest moment was the road widening. Every option meant someone losing a home, and no spreadsheet could make that abstract. We committed to rehousing everyone on the same lot, and the plan was better for it. What I’d ask a reader to notice: Malé’s problems are rarely about space. They’re about who the space was built for.

The Malé group leader

Villimalé

A reflection from the group leader

Before we arrived to begin our analysis, we viewed Villingili through a lens of pure leisure. To our outsider eyes, it was merely a green oasis drifting amidst the dense, grey sprawl of Greater Malé, a quiet escape where the only natural elements lived in isolation from the urban chaos. However, the deeper we looked, the more the island’s true character emerged. The silence we expected was actually a profound, shared stillness. We realised that Villingili is not just a landscape, but a living, breathing community. There is a palpable, tight-knit energy here; neighbours greet each other with a familiarity that feels ancestral. Their bond with the land is inseparable from their bond with one another, creating a rhythm of life that is as much about human connection as it is about the tides.

The Villimalé group leader

Hulhumalé

A reflection from the group leader

Before this study, Hulhumalé was not somewhere I thought to question. Phase 1 is green and open, its buildings low enough that you can still see sky between them. Phase 2 feels like a completely different place, tall blocks pressed close on every side, with almost nothing left open to breathe into. The hardest part was density. Every version of “fit more people in” seemed to end at the same answer, that being another 25-storey tower, blocking the next one’s light and air. Hulhumalé was built for people who came to Malé to work but couldn’t find space, or didn’t want to live in its congestion, people looking for somewhere to actually rest. Phase 1 still does that. Phase 2 gave it up entirely in the rush to house as many people as possible, and the result is a flat, monotonous way of living.

The Hulhumalé group leader