Walking on the streets of Medellin I noticed
young beggars in rags sleeping on the footpaths.
One night I observed an amazing thing. Seeing
that a boy had no food, another ragged, unshaven
man divided his meager rations, sharing the
little he had with his worse-off fellow street
dweller. This gesture of compassion filled me
with shame, and I felt bound that I must use
my skills as an architect to make the world a
better place to live. A beggar man become my
unsuspected guru in the streets of Medellin!
At Harvard in 1967, Jose Luis Sert gave us a
thesis problem to design housing projects in any
country we wished. I choose Colombia, and
created a shelter system called ‘site and
services’. My design envisioned very small
plots, whose services would be enhanced by the
local government, and the inhabitants
would build their own homes in accordance
with their capabilities.
In 1968 when I was on a Fulbright fellowship,
I volunteered to design a shelter project for
Sanatbhai Mehta, a social worker in Vadodara,
but it could not be built. As good luck would have
it, in 1972 Sanatbhai became Gujarat’s Minister
of Housing, just when HUDCO was formed, and
he invited seven architects to design low-cost
housing. The other architects found this
uninteresting, but my Jamnagar housing project
became the first Economically Weaker Section
Scheme funded by HUDCO. Seeing this project
emerge, the World Bank approached me to work
in Madras, and I drew on my thesis, creating an
effective site and services program, resulting
in thousands of plots becoming accessible
to homeless people. From Madras, the World
Bank carried this concept around the world.
Vasant Bawa, the founder of the Hyderabad
Urban Development Authority, then engaged
me to design low-cost housing for the Class IV
Employees’ Federation of Andhra Pradesh,
where I created small core houses on plots
large enough for ‘growing houses’ to emerge.
The owners added extra rooms, renting them
out to kinsmen migrating into the city. This
became a model for a self-managed urban
rental system, reaching lower into the income
strata to those who could not afford any
monthly installments; they became tenants!
The fees from this large project became the
seed-fund for creating the Centre for
Development Studies and Activities (CDSA) in
Pune. CDSA prepared an innovative integrated
rural development program in Ratnagiri for
the governments of India and Maharashtra,
supported by the United Nations. Working with
local people in Ratnagiri, micro-level,
participatory, social input plans were drawn
up. Through the Lead Bank Program, banks
piggy-backed economic assistance on to
the social services schemes. This evolved into
the Social Inputs for Area Development, a
decadal program of the Ministry of Social
Welfare, GoI, supported by UNICEF.This page: UWC
Mahindra College
Pune, Maharashtra,
1996-1998
©Col. Vivek Mundkur
Opposite page:
Supreme Court of
Bhutan, Thimphu,
2006-2014
©Deepak Kaw...