Placemaking: Challenges and Opportunities in the Indian Context
P. K. Das + Vikash Chandra | Architects
Placemaking: Challenges and Opportunities in the Indian Context
India continues to urbanise at an unprecedented rate, with residential townships, education campuses, healthcare centres and transport infrastructure projects being built across the country. As urban populations grow, pressures on mobility and public space for people of all ages have increased manifold. Among these many challenges lies one that seldom gets addressed by development plans and urban design proposals: Placemaking in the public realm. Public squares, river and sea fronts, and maidans are increasingly becoming contested spaces with challenges, controversies and pressures from various groups.
It is in this context that we have architects and urban designers P. K. Das and Vikash Chandra sharing their work and visions with us. P. K. Das’ work in public realm projects in Mumbai is well known. Vikash Chandra brings his experience as a leading technocrat in the Smart City Mission programme of the Government of India.
The two talks will be followed by a moderated discussion and a Q&A with the audience.
This event is part of the Placemaking India Weekend 2019 and has been brought to us by Vineeta Shetty, founder of The Smart Citizen, a global platform for stakeholders to share knowledge, collaborate and develop capability on smart nations, regions, cities and communities.
P.K. Das is popularly known as an Architect–Activist. His work includes organizing slum dwellers for better living and evolving affordable housing models, engaging in policy framework for public housing, reclaiming public spaces including developing the waterfronts, protection and conservation of natural areas, re-envisioning the city of Mumbai, along with an architectural practice involving urban planning, urban design, architecture and interior design assignments across India. You can read more about him here.
Vikash Chandra is a Finance and Public Private Partnership expert in the Smart City Mission Management Unit in the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India. He oversees more than 400 public-private partnered urban projects worth Rs. 33,000 crores in 100 smart cities. He studied architecture at Karnataka University and urban design at CEPT, Ahmedabad.
