Given the year on year decrease of rural farmland and various forms of land degradation through the intrusion of non-farm land uses, the government of Bangladesh has drafted the agrarian reform strategies, primarily to protect the agricultural land from encroachment, conversion, and indiscriminate use. The draft Agricultural Land Protection and Land Use Bill since its inception in 2011 is facing serious uncertainties of implementation due to its borrowed nature from the developed contexts and inadequacy to recognize the local complexities. With a particular focus on the densification component of the draft bill, a semester-long design studio was conducted in consultation with the existing villagers to explore the practicability of the draft bill in the villages of Tetultala and Chhoygharia in the south-western coastal Bangladesh. The findings from the two villages hint that in Bangladesh, the unique and evolving nature of rural settlements dynamics that are disintegrating the rural society from farming practices and the farmland, thereby, unsettling the traditional village-morphology. The settlements dynamics vary from those of the western context; hence, there is an emerging need to build locally situated knowledge towards a feasible rural land reform.

Purpose Urban flooding in developing countries of the Global South is growing due to extreme rainfall and sea-level rise induced by climate change, as well as the proliferation of impervious, built-up areas resulting from unplanned urbanisation and development. Continuous loss of traditional knowledge related to local water management practices, and the de-valuing of such knowledge that goes hand-in-hand with globalised aspirations, is inhibiting flood resilience efforts. This paper aims to address the need to include traditional water knowledge (TWK) in urban living and development processes in the Global South. Design/methodology/approach This paper commences with a review of existing frameworks that focus on natural resource management, critically assessing two existing frameworks of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). The assessment of the existing approaches contributes to this paper’s development of a novel framework to promote TWK with regard to resilience and risk reduction, specifically for developing flood adaptive strategies, which is the second stage of this paper. Finally, the paper explains how the framework can contribute to the field of urban design and planning using examples from the literature to demonstrate challenges and opportunities related to the adaptation of such a framework. Findings The framework developed in this paper reveals three proposed vertices of TWK, named as place-based landscape knowledge, water use and management and water values. This framework has the potential to produce context-specific knowledge that can contribute to flood-resilient built-environment through urban design and practices. Research limitations/implications The framework developed in this paper reveals three proposed vertices of TWK, named place-based landscape knowledge, water use and management and water values. This framework has the potential to produce context-specific knowledge that can contribute to flood-resilient built-environment through urban design and practices. Originality/value Within the field of TEK research, very few researchers have explored the field of developing flood resilience in an urban context. The proposed TWK framework presented in this paper will help to fill that gap.

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