By Taha Tariq on January 21, 2026

Taha Tariq

Taha Tariq is a sophomore at Dartmouth College studying Geography and Middle Eastern Studies with a minor in Human-Centred Design. A member of Ashoka UK’s Youth Changemaker Network, he is passionate about educational inequality, ranging from presenting research on T-Levels at Imperial College London to supporting campaigns on the importance of careers education with Teach First and Action for Race Equality. At Dartmouth, he is deeply involved in student advocacy as an elected Senator in Dartmouth Student Government and a member of the Student Advisory Board, where he works to ensure first-generation/low-income, international, and Muslim student needs are represented in campus decision-making. He is also a recent winner of the Great Initiative Award at Dartmouth, Vice-President of the Muslim Student Association, Co-Chair of the West-House Council and a photographer for the college newspaper, 'The Dartmouth.'  At Ashoka Arab World, Taha serves as a Fellowship and Venture Intern, supporting the search for new Fellows while also contributing to storytelling and communications that spotlight the work of Ashoka Fellows and partners across the region.

Building Belonging: Traditions Revived in the Medina of Tunis

Building Belonging

On a February afternoon in the Medina of Tunis, a room full of strangers took turns packing damp earth into a small frame, ramming it down layer by layer. Teenagers, architecture students and professors all got muddy for a shared notion of “heritage” and how it manifests as a living skill. 

That spirit to understand heritage had powered Traditions Revived, a two-day exchange supported by Ashoka’s Collaboration Grant, bringing together Radwa Rostom (Ashoka Fellow, Egypt), founder and CEO of HandOver and Leila Ben-Gacem (Ashoka Fellow, Tunisia), founder of Blue Fish and president of Mdinti, the Medina’s first economic interest group. 

HandOver is a design-and-build company that specialises in cost-effective earth building, with knowledge transfer facilitated through interactive workshops. Mdinti focuses on the socio-economic rehabilitation of the Medina of Tunis, for example, through supporting local crafts and encouraging youth civic engagement. Both share the belief that restoration becomes resilient when communities are treated as an anchor for projects, not sidelined as mere stakeholders.
 

A venue that widened the room

The workshop was hosted at Dar El Harka, Leila’s community space in the Medina that she had restored. It doubles as a co-working space and a cultural hub for locals. Hosting the exchange at Dar el Harka was an intentional and powerful decision that opened the door beyond an “expert-only”  crowd. The space naturally attracted a wider mix of ages and backgrounds, which results in a deeper connection to the local community. As Leila put it, the joy was seeing different generations “enjoying mud and building a wall together.” 
 

Making heritage tangible

Making heritage tangible

HandOver’s contribution to the collaboration wasn’t simply introducing a construction technique; it was showing how heritage can be passed on as a skill, which is done through the Dakkah kit. This kit is so central because it makes site-based craft portable, something that people can learn in any room and then take back to their own context. That’s the thematic shift, that heritage stops being something you “learn about,” and becomes something you can do, repeat, and teach forward.

This also reframes sustainability as something shaped by local contexts. Rather than the technique, what matters is the interaction with local natural resources. With basic materials and a portable method, HandOver’s lesson encapsulated this notion of building with what’s around you, and to design for the people who will live with the outcome, capturing the core of what it means to use human-centred design in practice. That resonated with Leila’s point that community-based work doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all solution because each context has different resources, constraints and opportunities. In other words, HandOver’s part of the workshop was all about access from who gets to touch the craft and, therefore, who gets to imagine a future inside it.
 

Seeing the city differently

Mdinti shifted the dialogue from making heritage tangible to legible. Their mapping and on-the-ground walk illustrated the Medina as a living system where buildings, livelihoods and public space are constantly negotiating with history. This is where the exchange weaves into one; the technique isn’t the headline, but observation is. When you learn to read a place properly, you start noticing what has become the status quo and the norm, but also what’s changing, and what materials and practices have kept the city standing.

Radwa’s team

Radwa’s team spoke about how eye-opening it was to see how the Medina is built with what it already has, stone. Local craft ecosystems and materials expand the imagination beyond a single “environmentally-friendly material.” The broader takeaway becomes replicable, as sustainability isn’t a product you import, but it’s a mindset you cultivate by looking and interacting closely with your own context. And once you see the city differently, you start designing differently. Not forcing a method onto a place, but letting the place teach you the method.
 

Momentum, made transferable

Radwa described the collaboration as having created a “momentum of awareness.” But momentum fades. That’s why the most strategic next step isn’t simply another workshop; it’s documentation. Capturing what worked, from HandOver’s kit-based pedagogy to Mdinti’s mapping as a tool for preservation, and the shared bottom-up approach that treats communities as the anchor of restoration.

Done properly, documentation can become the blueprint to benefit many people. From architecture students to practitioners replicating the technique, to even the prospect of institutionalising these skills, because the demand for sustainable, locally-rooted approaches is the direction that the entire field is heading towards.

Traditions Revived illustrated that a small, well-thought-out exchange can accomplish a great deal. From bringing a diverse audience into the same room to make built heritage seem accessible, to a valuable information exchange.

Traditions Revived didn’t end in Tunis; it started there. 

Ashoka’s Collaboration Grant:

Ashoka’s Collaboration Grant is a small, flexible fund (up to $5,000) designed to help social entrepreneurs and Ashoka Fellows put their minds together to work on a short, practical collaboration that builds real capacity, not just a one-off activity. Teams are typically 2-4 people (with at least one Ashoka Fellow), must co-design and co-implement the work, and deliver it within 12 months. The grant can cover travel, research, training and producing shared outputs (e.g., reports, toolkits, etc.), with a focus on peer-to-peer learning, skills exchange and relationships that continue beyond the grant period. 

Construction Environment & Sustainability