Learning from Delhi: Dispersed Initiatives in Changing Urban Landscapes

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

This book is based on a groundbreaking course in the architecture of rapid change and scarce resources run by London Metropolitan University in which students explore slum settlements within Delhi, Agra and Mumbai. It provides an invaluable theoretical and practical guide to `thinking global whilst acting local'.

Suspicious of modern urban planning, students are encouraged to use a range of techniques to observe, map and understand the rich urban context for themselves.

This book examines how dispersed, carefully crafted initiatives undertaken amongst a diverse range of cultures ranging from Marwari nomads to waste pickers, from settlers on marginal land to quarry worker children, can enhance an academic and pragmatic discourse leading eventually to improvements in the quality of life within these transitional communities.

By describing this ongoing and expanding programme, the book documents a new approach' to architectural education and sets it within a theoretical framework. It goes on to record how several small but significant live projects have emerged out of the studio programme, demonstrating the validity of the approach and thereby opening up a pathway to meaningful practice for its graduates both within the vibrant urban settlements under study and elsewhere.

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.