Vernacular Architecture as Living Socio-Material Heritage: An Integrative Framework for Environment, Culture, Material Practice, and Governance

Vernacular architecture is studied as climate-responsive construction, cultural expression, material practice, and heritage, yet the literature does not always explain how fabric, skills, institutions, and environmental relations change together. This critical interpretive review asks what changes when vernacular architecture is conceptualised as living socio-material heritage rather than only as a building type, material culture, or environmental knowledge. An auditable search and citation-chaining procedure yielded 110 scholarly publications and seven official heritage documents and guidance sources, which were analysed through comparative conceptual coding. The review distinguishes three historically grounded traditions—environmental adaptation, cultural-interpretive approaches, and architectural anthropology—from three cross-cutting extensions: material engagement, sustainability and local/traditional or Indigenous knowledge, and biocultural niche construction. Their comparison supports a polycentric framework linking ecological and material conditions; making, dwelling and repair; learning and transmission; institutions, tenure, and community authority; and selection or adaptation decisions. Critical heritage scholarship treats designation as heritage-making that reallocates authority, expertise, regulation, revenue, and property effects. Living socio-material heritage does not present relational or process-oriented heritage as new; it reorganises those approaches around architecture-specific maintenance, transmission, governance, and adaptation mechanisms. A secondary-literature application to documented earthen-building change in northern Ghana illustrates, rather than validates, the framework. Five provisional propositions provide testable directions for research and heritage management.