Vision of Housing and Settlement Division (HSD) is to prepare socially-responsive, spatially-sensitive, and sustainability- and resiliency-aware critical practitioners.

Housing fulfills one of the basic human needs of shelter and access to which constitute human rights. Housing is both a product of and process for creating an environment for living, livelihoods and socialization. Housing and Settlement Division (HSD) deals with the planning and design aspects of the production, consumption and management of housing in relation to settlement as its broader contextual framework. HSD organizes undergraduate and postgraduate programmes, coordinates (design) research through Cell for Resilient Dwelling, and guides interaction with other divisions and stakeholders.

Theory, design and researches under this division, on the one hand, examine the problems, policies and production of affordable, resilient and sustainable housing solutions through community-based and market-driven approaches across a rapidly expanding urban-rural continuum. At a settlement level, on the other hand, they relate housing solutions to broader agenda like sustainability, resiliency, and development. These multi-scalar engagements reveal the contesting nature of housing: tradition-modernity, formal-informal dichotomy, rural-urban linkages, accessibility-affordability, density-crowding, privacy-urbanity, homeowners-homelessness etc. Thematic issues like house form and culture, gender and space use, home-based enterprises, post-disaster housing etc. become HSD focus too.

An understanding of the formation, growth and development of housing in relation to settlement amidst decreasing per capita land, climate changes during rapid and unplanned urbanization in countries like Bangladesh come under the purview of HSD. HSD thus becomes inter-disciplinary, relational, and multi-scalar by referring to global, national and community contexts and concerns.