Learning from Delhi

Based on a course run by the London Metropolitan University School of Architecture, in which students produce schemes from research undertaken during field trips to India, this title provides a comprehensive review of the course and of the schemes produced since 2002, and argues the value of linking practical projects with education in the studio.

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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.