ARCHITECTURE

Sustainable rural drinking water is a widespread aim in India, and globally, from the household to district, state, and national scales. Sustainability issues in the rural drinking water sector range from increasing water demand to declining groundwater levels, premature deterioration of village schemes and services, inadequate revenues for operations and maintenance, weak capacity of water operators, frequently changing state and national policies, and destabilizing effects of climate change. This paper focuses on the special role of district-scale drinking water planning, which operates at the intersection between bottom-up water demand and top-down water programs. After surveying the challenges associated with bottom-up and top-down planning approaches, we present recent efforts to strengthen district and block drinking water planning in the state of Maharashtra. A combination of district interviews, institutional history, village surveys, GIS visualization, and planning workshop...

This paper examines how the evolution of architectural generative design processes aim to apply similar physical and geometrical principles of biological processes taking place during development and to translate them to fabrication processes. In analogy to the reaction-diffusion mechanism for biological pattern prediction, the logic of stripe is used as construction system and examined for its structural behaviour. Both, mesh relaxation processes and weighted mesh graphs representations are employed as design tools for the construction of a minimal thin shell structural skin with branching topologies. Eventually the design workflow is extended to engage also collaborative fabrication processes and to steer the design based on intuition, knowledge of the fabrication tools, properties of the materials, manufacturing simulations and logic of assemble. This approach could lead to the optimization of material usage and machine time and facilitate the assembly process of a physical object which integrates the whole process into its form. The outcomes have been used to fabricate a prototype, using three different materials and digital fabrication methods, to examine the stability and the mechanical connectivity by taking in count the tolerances. The paper argues that biological skin patterns and segmentation in fabrication open a new field of interdisciplinary investigation and architectural applications.

Physical environment is one of the factors that influences the activities and spaces formed to a varying degree and in many different ways. Footpaths form a significant micro-place of the physical urban environment. Primarily, a path for pedestrian accessibility and acts as an important public place for the city. In the scenario of socio-economic conditions in developing countries, owing to high poverty rate, unemployment and rural-urban migration, it is beneficial for people to adopt the informal way of using this entity of footpath. Moreover, due to the lack of efficient monitoring, footpaths, in this part of the world, have multiple utility factors, mainly social, economic and cultural.
The paper explores the role of the physicality of the footpath in the manifestation of spaces – tangible/intangible and the diverse activities. The quest is into identifying the meaningful relationship of geometry and multiple physical elements on a footpath with the quality of the public realm generated. The physical elements are analysed with reference to the context of certain Indian cities.
These physical elements have been qualitatively documented by means of surveys and a subjective understanding through observations of the sites taken for study.
A comprehensive understanding of these elements in the public realm revealed their influence in regulating certain movement patterns. The justifications for a particular path being more frequented are a matter of function and aesthetics rather than just intuition. This micro-understanding of various physical elements and the behaviour patterns observed on footpath can help in long-term street planning measures, at various scales. The paper highlights vital approaches in providing certain design opportunities with respect to the physical elements and the geometry of the footpath, thus improving the public realm of the street and of the place.

The age of Urbanization is pushing built environment of cities in countries like India to the limit. Cities and urban spaces have more users than ever. The quality of existing urban spaces has declined. New urban spaces often fail to resonate with the scale of city or only limited to certain buildings like malls, losing their association with all classes of city. It is essential that urban spaces are associated with the city's regional patterns and scales to avoid alienation, over or under scaling of spaces. Pulsating urban spaces are existing urban spaces in a city where physical qualities, activities, elements and users have evolved and they still seem to positively respond the activities, element, users and infrastructure requirement to certain extent. These spaces essentially have supported public life for many years and continue to do so. The study examines the significance of the existing pulsating urban spaces of the city, traditional and contemporary; which later aims comprehensive understanding of the scale in the instrumentation of the urban spaces along with the influence of the regional spatial identities experienced, interpreted and documented in the research process. The research is divided in four stages. Stage one considers Pulsating Urban Spaces, their characters, types while stating their significance in the City. Second stage is an attempt to develop method to map such spaces. The third stage evaluates their spatial significance in the region. The final stage includes a case of Pulsating Urban space with possible mapping of such spaces in the same city. The study focuses the factors of improvisation of newer spaces. The study specifically considers Pulsating Urban spaces from Indian context only. The surveys included in the study are entirely qualitative and subjective.

Around nine percent of Mumbai city's land possesses half the slum population. This glaring inequality is dominant at a socio-spatial level. The failure of government-incentivised market solutions to resolve the affordable housing crisis (like the Slum Rehabilitation Scheme and Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojna) is evident across Mumbai, except in a handful of projects. This research plans to investigate the lesser known examples in Mumbai, where communities have mobilised themselves to become housing providers, as a response to these market failures. A social innovation in itself, the process of Self Redevelopment involves communities coming together, registering themselves as a cooperative housing society, acquiring land and being at the forefront. Through a case by case analysis of scattered attempts of self-redevelopment in Mumbai, and a comparative analysis, we argue the presence and role of multiple stakeholders-like the State, private players, N G Os, activists, academicians, and certainly, the users-without whom this community-led execution shall be impossible. We hypothesise that, slum development/ redevelopment/ upgradation is successful only in places where users have been an integral part of the decision-making process.

This essay is the housing story of Ahmed (pseudonym) and his family, as it parallels housing-policy shifts in India, particularly in Mumbai. The timeframe for this story intersects with the three decades of economic liberalization and policy deregulation in India. As this personal trajectory unfolds in Dharavi, one of the biggest slums in Asia, it raises simultaneous questions and issues when linked to the social-housing evolution at the municipal and national scale. The story is broadly divided into three phases from 1990s to 2020, toggling between Ahmed’s personal journey and the political transformations occurring at different scales.

The nature of tenure 'contracts' that exist within the low-income settlements involves more than title deeds. Accordingly, 'tenure security' manifests itself beyond legal or de jure construction as it also involves de facto forms of tenure and dweller's perception of security. The perceived tenure security is in turn a function of people's lived experiences which shape the trust they may grant to the future effectiveness of land tenure arrangements. Contextual and historical factors, ranging from political patronage to market pressure to policy provisions, govern the perception of tenure security which usually gets overlooked in policy formulations. With a focus on Mumbai and Jaipur in India, this paper aims to generate and examine the viability of a list of indicators that influence perceptions of land and housing tenure security. The intention is to engender a method towards housing solutions beyond the unidirectional aim of titling and in favour of incremental approaches.

This document has been produced by UCL students from the MSc Urban Development Planning (2019-2020) programme, as part of the partnership between the Just Space network and UCL Development Planning Unit. It builds on the results of an engagement research with the Bengali East End Heritage Society (BEEHS) in 2018 (Abdallah, Bryant, Gao, Kröpfl, Meinsma, Quintanilla Gomez, Snyder, Tran, Velasquez & Zhuang, 2018), where priorities and concerns for the future of Spitalfields- Banglatown were highlighted, and further research and interviews with BEEHS and other local stakeholders carried out by students in 2019.

This report and the project it supports are parts of an ongoing partnership between ArkomJogja, Kalijawi and the Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU) Faculty of the Built Environment at University College London (UCL). The partnership is based on shared aims to promote community-centred planning and development in the Special Region of Yogyakarta (DIY), Indonesia, where ArkomJogja and Kalijawi are based. MSc Urban Development Planning students in the 2019/2020 academic year worked closely with DPU faculty during two academic terms and engaged virtually with members of ArkomJogja and Kalijawi in May 2020. Engagement with the two Indonesia-based organisations was virtual and remote due to the global COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. In this project, DPU students aim to: build on the large amount of existing knowledge from the ongoing partnership of the three organisations; document the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis on the residents of Yogyakarta’s Kampungs; and highlight community-led responses to COVID-19 in Yogyakarta and across the world to support ArkomJogja and Kalijawi’s advocacy for community-centred development. Communities and NGOs are meeting immediate needs that are not being provided for by local, regional or national governments or the private sector. Therefore, community-led actions can be pathways to a more just society than the current development trajectory promotes.