Self-settlement in future Indian cities

India is in a critical phase; until 2050 the urban popul. will double. 25% can’t afford any formal housing. Inspired by the principle of self-settlement, framework conditions shall be introduced for future new towns, in which semi-informal living space can emerge and grow up to a liveable and valuable urban quarter in a regulated and guided manner.

The idea for this paper evolved bit by bit during my research trip to India in 2014. I wanted to get firsthand information about recent tendencies in urban strategies and find out how people in power are planning to deal with the growing urban population. How would this change the image of the typical Indian city? And how will these Indian cities be organized? Will they be just the simple reproduction of the typical western New Town? Or could something more original and independent evolve, not just in means of sole formalism, but much more in respect of its idiosyncrasy, embracing its very own culture, society and situation to create something more unique; more convenient, considering tradition and the needs of the poor? Will India go through the usual transformation process; from an agricultural economy over industrialization to a service economy? Or will it even be able to take advantage of its situation, learn from the mistakes other countries have already made and even skip some stages of this transformation process and avoid some negative side effect? However, having seen the slums of Mumbai and Delhi, and the street vendors of Ahmedabad and Pune, I realized that, the unplanned, was in fact an inextricable part of the present Indian city and when I saw the tidy top-down masterplans of the projected New Towns, one big question was more and more obtruding: How can these cities be strictly formal, as shown in the visualizations? Will there be no poverty anymore and everyone will be able to afford formal urban living space? Or are these New Towns exclusive cities, built only for those who can afford to live there? How can the people in charge be sure that these cities do not have the same fate as dozens of New Towns in the Indian history which turned partly into slums? After some research, I saw that such a scenario was not far-fetched. So I decided to adapt these master plans; to develop a proposal, in which a certain degree of planned informality is introduced, to absorb the arriving current of migrants in the context of urbanization and population growth.