1st Edition
Learning from Delhi Dispersed Initiatives in Changing Urban Landscapes
The inflexibility of modern urban planning, which seeks to determine the activities of urban inhabitants and standardise everyday city life, is challenged by the unstoppable organic growth of illegal settlements. In rapidly expanding cities, issues of continuity with local traditions, local conditions and local ways of working are juxtaposed with those of abrupt change due to emergency, reaction to modernity, environmental degradation, global market forces and global technological imperatives to make efforts to control by physical planning redundant as soon as they are enacted. In most third world cities there is little social welfare and almost no attempt at social housing.
Biography
Maurice Mitchell is Reader at the Department of Architecture and Spatial Design at London Metropolitan University. He has also taught at the Architectural Association, Oxford Brookes University and the Development Planning Unit, University College London.
Prize: Winner of the UDG Publisher's Award 2012 'This book is a powerful wake-up call to all architects. It speaks about the meaning of architecture in circumstances that appear very different to those with which we are familiar in the West. The line of enquiry always revolves around the question of "how might architecture improve the way we live?"... It is a manifesto for an alternative form of architectural practice,... a testament to the value of an education - not a training - and undoubtedly equips students with strategies that are increasingly relevant. The reader is offered beautiful and mind blowingly complicated plans of existing settlements that have been surveyed, not copied and pasted. Evocatively shady interior views are set into landscapes strewn with debris; all the drawings inhabited by people. This is the landscape of humanity, where architecture serves as a backdrop, not a monument.' The Architectural Review 'Useful and beneficial for student, practitioner and academic alike, Learning from Delhi not only brings together notions of the spatio-physical and socio-economic, but also spatio-temporal and socio-environmental. An engaging book, joyful to go through...' Urban Design
