Increased frequency of natural hazards and sea level rise are expected impacts of climate change in India. Marginalised urban settlements are often vulnerable to disaster due to their location in hazardous areas and the use of non-durable building materials.Their inhabitants are therefore strongly affected by climate change. But amidst strives to meet climate targets, the poor's needs are mostly overlooked.

In this context, there is an urgent need for paradigmatic shift in the education of graduate students in spatial planning and design as well as training of urban professionals from different backgrounds in order to confront upcoming challenges related to climate change impacts on urban informal settlements.

The BReUCom project intents to conceive and pilot 20 short terms post-graduate Professional Development Programs (PDPs) targeted at real world problems. It aims to produce Open Educational Resources by developing 10 comparative case studies and 10 descriptions of new courses for graduate students in existing programs, following MIT's OpenCourseWare (OCW) model. It shall pilot new courses on urban resilience in existing curricula for graduate students.

The Professional Development Programs (PDPs) are designed to function as modules on urban resilience for urban professionals from different backgrounds and working experiences, pilot modules including internships with NGOs in India and Europe.

For more information: https://www.breucom.eu

Thursday 24 October 2019

BReUCom Case Study 02: Resilience in Historic Indian Towns






Introduction

Resilience amidst communities is a function of its ability to negotiate and overcome chronic stresses and shocks. Historic urban spaces in a rapidly urbanising economy like India are extremely contested and exhibit social as well as spatial stresses. Coupled with these ‘natural’ stresses, the state developed tools & mechanisms fail to protect the urban fabric or actively abets a biased unreal development model. In this context, methods to develop studied proposals aimed towards safeguarding the cultural identity embedded in built heritage of the historic town is very much required both in people’s imagination as well as the state vision.
In Mumbai, the recent World Heritage tag for the Gothic Architecture and the Art Deco Ensemble prompts one to relook at the status of the communities, their livelihood and their housing within the Inner Fort Precincts as well as the Native Town.


Objective

The course intends to identify inherent resiliences of the historic urban communities and develop models to further strengthen them based on the values, interests and aspirations of various stakeholders. The studio also seeks to update and enrich the base data of the housing and livelihood conditions.


Preliminary Findings

  • Rich community network across religious, regional identities, food and cultural diversities 
  • Spirit of Entrepreneurship reflected in the livelihood activities
  • Unreal Estate driven Speculative development pressures are not sustainable and resilient solutions. The new high rise typologies are leading to poor quality of urban spaces.
  • Lack of empathy towards heritage and myopic vision for a holistic development reflected in the development plan leading to relatively rapid erasure of the identity of the place.
  • Lastly the preliminary interactions with stakeholders elicit mix responses ranging from largely despondency to few voices of hope.
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This communication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein. 

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