Reimagining Indian Urbanism and Design
Urban India is passing through the Anthropocene, where humans have permeated everywhere and shape everything. The approaches of sustainable development focus largely on socio-economic and technical aspects, over-riding the human and cultural values. The architectural design, urban planning and environment impact assessment often ignore the social and cultural aspects, leading to increasing carbon footprints. It needs relooking at cross-cultural realities, underpinning the socio-economic and cultural dimensions and adoption of circular concepts of the resources and development. The trend of walk to work and work from home need reimagining the process of planning and design. In this context, the urbanism must shift from predigital, fossil fuel era to renewables, digital and circular systems. This needs leapfrogging in the areas of combinatorial and discrete optimisation by algorithms, 4D mapping, downloading, networking, presencing, artificial intelligence, big data analytics, the ubiquitous cloud and robotics. The setools aim to address the impending issues of pollution, energy and water shortages and make the buildings and cities green and carbon negative.
