planning


Addressing information asymmetries to enable housing coproduction: Q&A with Rohit Lahoti and Sayali Marawar

By on August 24th 2021

The role of access to information in empowering the poor is well-acknowledged in India and reinforced by the experience of the Right to Information Act, 2005. However, information asymmetries continue to hamper the ability of the poor to make informed decisions about their future. A new online resource seeks to address this gap in the context of housing. The IHR team speaks to the founders about their motivations, challenges and aspirations for this platform.

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Mixed-use housing in Indian cities: a data snapshot

By and on August 3rd 2021

Mixed-use development has gained popularity in the field of urban planning, particularly in Indian megacities, where economic activity and residential lives are often situated in close proximity to each other. This data tale analyses NSSO data to provide a snapshot of residential houses reporting mixed-use in urban areas of India.

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Impact of resettlement in the Kathputli Colony transit camp

By and on May 4th 2021

Drawing on over a decade of research on the Kathputli Colony in Delhi, this two-part series focuses on the complex processes involved in the in-situ rehabilitation of squatter settlements. While the first part focused on the differentiated nature of the resettlement processes, this second piece focuses on the transit camp, examining the multidimensional impact on the residents who are endlessly awaiting their final rehabilitation.

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Regularising Unauthorised Colonies in Delhi: Well-Intended but Not Enough

By , and on April 13th 2021

A recent regularisation scheme promises to improve the tenure security of about 5 million Delhi residents. But how inclusive is the scheme and does it keep pace with the realities on the ground? Sukrit Nagpal, Smriti Singh and Sonal Sharma from SEWA Bharat take a critical look.

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Reading the PMAY against past urban housing schemes

By on February 5th 2021

The Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM), launched in 2005, and the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY), launched in 2015, have been some of the most significant interventions towards improved housing in recent times. A comparative look at their contribution to urban housing offers some clues about how policy is being shaped to respond to the emerging needs of Indian cities.

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Saving Bastis

By and on November 3rd 2020

Why the Delhi government must not squander the chance to overturn an anti-poor housing policy

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Assessing Shelters Across South Delhi’s Changing Spaces and Moving People

By on September 24th 2020

About half of Delhi’s homeless shelters operate at full capacity to overcrowded conditions, providing less space than the norm of 50 sq.ft. per resident. This is a planning problem since policymakers have treated critical questions of where shelters should be built, how many residents shelters should accommodate, and how much space to allot for each shelter as separate issues at various times, and independent of the actual demographics that the various shelters in different parts of the city cater to.

This piece focuses on two neighboring, identically-sized porta-cabin shelters in South Delhi’s Nehru Place, which cater to two different groups of homeless people. It juxtaposes narratives of the two sets of residents with an analysis of the official data to reveal why, over the last eighteen months (March 2019-August 2020), one of them was constantly overcrowded and the other was, by official standards, modestly but consistently utilized.

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Crammed In Or Shut Out? Implications of Delhi’s Homeless Shelter System’s Floor Space Constraints – with Attention to the Potential Public Health Risks of Overcrowded Shelters during COVID-19

By on July 27th 2020

Through an analysis of shelter and homelessness data from the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board and the Census, this study examines extent of overcrowding in Delhi’s homeless shelters and its implications on the ability of residents in these spaces to socially distance to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It examines the nature and implications of limited floor space across Delhi’s homeless shelter system to ascertain the extent to which the system’s capacity and coverage problems are rooted in shelter planning and design.

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Placing The Poor In The Flood Path

By on January 1st 2016

The creation of mass ghettos of urban poverty in the middle of ecologically fragile lands exposes the fraudulence of both the environmental and the socio-legal rationale of resettlement in Chennai.

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The real lives of urban fantasies

By on April 20th 2014

This paper is a response to and a commentary on Vanessa Watson’s paper on “African urban fantasies” in this issue of the Journal, which analyzes new urban master plans developed by international architectural firms and property development companies for many cities in sub-Saharan Africa. Taking Watson’s argument as an opportunity to think about current urban fantasies in Indian cities, this response offers three reflections.

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