The road to the city
How renewed attention to urban-rural linkages may reshape the urbanisation debate. (The Hindu 5/11/2017)
Mess is more
Recent research in Dhaka show that accommodation and housing are related but distinct needs. (The Hindu, 30.07.17)
Homegrown cities
This experiment in affordable housing led to the co-designing and construction of a small house in Shivaji Nagar, in Govandi. A neighbourhood in Mumbai that is struggling against all odds to keep growing and improving.
Form Follows Recognition
Recognizing patterns and processes are crucial to urban practice. The role of architects as agents of incremental growth needs to be emphasised over that of creators of a future that doesn’t yet exist.
Cairo: User-Driven Housing Construction
Housing must be seen as a process rather than a product: its values lie in the relationship and inter-action between the actors, their activities and the produced house.
Morden Mumbai: Revisiting BDD Chawls.
Tracing the history of the BDD chawls and what its location and typology mean for future development of the city.
Shivaji Nagar M Ward
While residents may live here and work elsewhere, this neighbourhood also shows a high level of its own economic activities.
Occupancy versus Ownership
The competition for land, rather than the traditional competition for tenants, was especially exacerbated in sites of growing industrialization and development like Bombay.
Affordable Housing in Mumbai: 100 Years of Failed Experiments
How to provide housing for all classes of people who need it, taking their varied livelihoods into account, while balancing their relative abilities to invest in housing?
The Life of a Lane in Sakinaka
Architecture relies on inputs of the occupants to incrementally design a house extension in Sakinaka.
The Homegrown Cities Project
How local, community owned and managed housing co-operatives, can be a vital step towards improving the neighbourhoods, bringing good quality civic infrastructure and making the city genuinely ’slum-free’.
Top of the World: Amrut Nagar
Where affordable housing is scarce but people have tweaked the system and the land to achieve the best possible results in the given circumstances.
Homegrown Affordable Housing
The so-called slums of the city are in many ways attempts at increasing affordable housing units through a different construction and financial system.
Chronicles of a Satellite City
Local newspapers doubled, tripled and eventually quadrupled with classifieds about the shiny, affordable, chic new buildings with swimming pools coming up in every empty corner.
Aranya: A story of incremental development
Lowcost housing by Architect B V Doshi, whose planned vision grew very incrementally.
The 2.5 Lakh Rupee House
Local contractor Amar Madhukar Nirjankar constructs the most affordable house for one of his clients in Bhandup's homegrown neighbourhood.
Unsettling Delhi
Micro homes which integrate spaces of work and are well connected to the street economy seem to be far more viable on the longer run at all levels.