The ‘co-living’ concept is a reflection of the ‘asset-light model’ that was pioneered by the hospitality sector. The concept is fast emerging as an alternative residential real estate offering, ensuing as a sustainable solution to the ever-growing urban space scarcity. To map, understand, and predict the development and growth of this shared housing segment, JLL Research conducted a demand survey targeting millennials across the top seven cities in India, and the report foresees this young shared living market continuing to be re-shaped during its nascent years. 

This post features highlights from the 146th talk in the series of CPR-CSH Urban Workshops, where
Tanu Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher at William and Mary, talks about the nature of formal complaints lodged by citizens against bureaucrats, and how the content of these demands shape government responsiveness. The discussion delves into her research looking at theory and evidence from Mumbai, which distinguishes between complaints demanding the reallocation of resources between citizens and those that simply require some level of state capacity to address.

The Housing Policy Timeline is an attempt to understand and analyse the key policy shifts within this period. The timeline deals with the evolution of public policies on housing in India, and the consecutive Five-Year Plan wise allocation of funds towards housing schemes and policy initiatives. Across the timeline, the various schemes and policies initiated and institutions set up help in understanding the role of economic and political ideologies and priorities.

This post features highlights from the 145th talk in the series of CPR-CSH Urban Workshops, where Paroj Banerjee, Ratoola Kundu, and Maggie Paul talk about their ongoing research in Mumbai, Kolkata, and Delhi on the struggles of the houseless communities during 2020 to 2021. The discussion and the study raises important policy and governance questions about houseless communities in the city, arguing that the predominant shelter-centric policy discourse fails to capture the agency, the lived realities, and fundamental contributions and specific vulnerabilities of those who have made a home in the city, but do not have a ‘house’ to live in.

The Housing Policy Timeline is an attempt to understand and analyse the key policy shifts within this period. The timeline deals with the evolution of public policies on housing in India, and the consecutive Five-Year Plan wise allocation of funds towards housing schemes and policy initiatives. Across the timeline, the various schemes and policies initiated and institutions set up help in understanding the role of economic and political ideologies and priorities.

How does civic action produce an understanding of the city at particular points in time? How can archival practices excavate and activate these submerged knowledges? These are questions that S. Bharat engaged with to create an archive of these narratives in a multiplicity of forms: letters, memos, reports, field notes, checklists, parliamentary bills and legal documents, newspaper clippings and articles, concept notes, press releases, circulars, reading lists, bibliographies and more, offering a close-grained look into the everyday dynamics of grassroots civic action, urban movements, planning and policy initiatives, and developmental activity in Kolkata.

The making of the city of Delhi is characterised by perennial eviction at the legal and spatial peripheries of its urban landscape. Disturbingly, this character of regular eviction was not disturbed even during the time of the COVID–19  pandemic, when the world was facing a state of exception.

Close to 900 families live in the ordered stacks of four-storeyed flats in Baprola in west Delhi. After being evicted from their informal bastis within the city, they were herded and resettled into these low-rise flats, each with barely enough space to house the families of four to five members. Pushed far from their places of work, with peeling plastered walls and water shortages, the residents lament about their state of residence, their grievances unheard and unseen, all but forgotten in the peripheries of the city.

Last week in the area of Jahangirpuri in Delhi, residents watched as bulldozers arrived early in the morning, and started hastily demolishing shops and homes. Videos of the bulldozers in the area surfaced online, showing a large crowd gathered, and residents imploring the authorities to spare their homes. One of many resettlement colonies formed in […]

A conversation between Jhono Bennett, co-founder and co-director of 1to1 – Agency of Engagement, a non-profit that provides a design-based collaboration between grassroots organisations, professionals, academia, and government, and Mukta Naik, a Fellow at CPR, who is an architect and an urban planner. Their conversation explores ideas of design-led practice and learning, practice-oriented design in South Africa, and parallels between the post-colonial contexts of India and South Africa.