A rising young architectural researcher from Saint Lucia is set to showcase her work on regional housing challenges on one of the Caribbean’s leading urban development platforms, marking a major milestone in her rapidly advancing career.
Twenty-eight-year-old Bonita Bart, a junior architect, educator and design entrepreneur, has received formal acceptance to present her research paper *The Architectural Language in Affordable, Social, and Urban Housing* at the 2026 Caribbean Urban Forum (CUF), scheduled to kick off in Jamaica this coming June. The appearance will mark Bart’s first presentation at a high-profile regional gathering, and it will put a spotlight on both Saint Lucia and early-career researchers from small island developing states.
The annual CUF convenes cross-sector stakeholders across the Caribbean, including urban planners, practicing architects, government policymakers, and academic researchers, to collaborate on tackling the most pressing challenges facing Caribbean urban centers and co-develop context-appropriate solutions tailored to the unique needs of small island nations.
Bart’s work centers on an underexplored gap in housing research: how the terminology used to describe housing projects shapes outcomes for funding, implementation, and access. As she explained in an interview with local publication *St. Lucia Times*, her analysis investigates how housing-related terms are used both in professional architectural circles and in local community contexts, as well as how the language used by project teams influences relationships with funding bodies and private sector partners.
First published in February 2025, Bart’s paper unpacks how clearer language use can improve responses to housing insecurity across the Caribbean, a region that disproportionately struggles with the global housing crisis. A core contribution of her work is untangling the common, consequential confusion between three widely used housing terms: affordable, social, and urban housing. These descriptors are frequently swapped interchangeably in industry and policy discourse, but Bart’s analysis demonstrates that they carry distinct meanings—and that recognizing these differences is critical to advancing effective housing solutions.
“Many times, when we try to address the housing crisis, which is a global crisis especially for Small Island Developing States, we get stuck in confusion and unproductive debate,” Bart noted. “What stands out in existing research is that the most successful funded projects that actually solve housing challenges often don’t even use the term ‘affordable’.”
She argues that in many cases, framing housing projects around terms that align with global development priorities—such as “green” or “resilient” housing—can improve both relevance to community needs and chances of securing critical funding. Adjusting terminology to match both local context and global funding priorities, she argues, can remove a key barrier to delivering housing that actually meets community needs across the region.
Bart’s CUF presentation is just one output of the Caribtecture initiative, an ongoing research project she launched four years ago to advance scholarship on Caribbean architectural practice. The initiative’s core mission, as Bart describes it, is to nurture a distinct Caribbean architectural identity through targeted research, systematic documentation, and open critical discourse, framing the region’s architectural history and theory as active, practical tools that can shape better contemporary design across the islands.
The Caribtecture initiative grew naturally out of Bart’s academic career: in 2022, she graduated from the University of Technology Jamaica with a Bachelor of Arts in Architectural Studies, and her undergraduate final work won two of the institution’s top honors: Best Final Design Studio Project and Best Final Year Undergraduate Research Project.
Beyond her research work, Bart holds multiple roles across Saint Lucia’s architectural and education sectors. She is the founder and lead design principal of iBart Design Studio, an independent local architectural practice based in Saint Lucia, serves as secretary of the Saint Lucia Institute of Architects, and works as a technical drawing instructor for local students.