Gandhi and Architecture：A Time for Low-Cost Housing

Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low-Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low-cost, low-rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhi's religio-philosophical emphasis on the necessity of establishing limits in everyday actions. This book approaches the making of a 'Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude' as an enduring present.

Drawing from rich archival and field materials, the book explores Gandhi's religiosity and the British Spiritualist, Madeline Slade's creation of his low-cost hut, Adi Niwas, in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low-cost housing architecture of finitude founded on the Gandhian ideal of self-sacrifice and the need to establish absolute limits. Successive generations in post-colonial India have reimagined a secular necessity for this low-cost housing architecture of finitude.

In the early 1950s era of mass-housing for post-partition refugees from Pakistan, the making of a low-cost housing architecture was premised on the necessity of responding to economic concerns and to an emerging demographic mandate. In the 1970s, during the Oil and Petroleum Exporting Countries crisis, it was premised on the rise of urban and climatological necessities. More recently, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, its reception has been premised on the emergence of language-based identitarianism in Wardha, Maharashtra.

Each of these moments of necessity reveals the enduring present of a Gandhian low-cost housing architecture of finitude. This volume is a critical intervention in the philosophy of architectural history. Drawing ecclectically from science and technology studies, political science, housing studies, urban studies and anthropology, this richly illustrated volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of architecture and design, housing, history, sociology, economics, Gandhian studies, urban studies and development studies.