Showing posts with label Housing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Housing. Show all posts

Feb 18, 2023

Why it's high time to revisit architectural tradition, architectural wisdom and architecture education?

Please visit my web page "Urban Tenets" at https://urbantenets.nl/

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When kitchen's purpose, ideal design and it's appropriate space in a house was being concluded century ago or so, then architects actually had no vision of app based food delivery, home based chef, role of kitchen/kitchen products in remote elementary education, working women, gender equality in kitchen, work from home concept, how important kitchen waste reduction and management is and so on; when this matter is being discussed today, we hardly have any realistic idea how robots are going to take over kitchen in near-distant future, how 3D printed food may altar food production/ preferences, how IIOT/ IOT may impact farm-to-plate food supply chain, whether community/ township level bespoke food/ pizza vending machine may even render private kitchen obsolete.

When architects were convinced that there is basic necessity of having lobby, lounge, drawing room and dining room/area as essential elements of a reasonable house, they had no vision that majority of family individuals in future will spend most of their non-working hours/ personal work hours/ recreation hours/ study hours within two to ten feet range from their TV set and/or desktop/ study table/ gaming console; they didn't envisage that "Activity" and "lifestyle" (scrolling phone, tab, working/ entertaining on laptop, yoga mat time - all virtually devoid of space anchorage) will be paramount compared to need of "Formal Space" (drawing room etc.); they had no idea that family members will be doing part of talking/ communication / information exchange virtually (as a routine) even when present under one roof, getting rid of dining table discussion; they missed visualising that in future due to almost autonomous lifestyle of individual family members of a household it will be almost impossible to bring every family member to dining table, that too at same time and also not realising that with plethora of audio-visual choices and modes available, the empowered individuals in a family will lack the time, motivation and patience to gather in front of TV to watch a common channel, defying purpose of drawing room.

And likewise.

Come today- dining room mutating into study room, drawing room reinvented as gym and so on, calls for urgent need of revisiting the inherited architectural values and reinventing ideology of functional space.

Author: Anoop Jha

#architecture #architect #urbanplanning #townplanning #space #interiordesign #decor #studio #design #art #habitat #housing #hfa #housingforall #smartcity #city #bhk #realestate #township #data #future #futurearchitecture #history #lounge #home

Feb 21, 2015

Scaling of opportunities, a bigger challenge than scaling up urban infrastructure!


Tackling immediate soft urban challenges through resource prioritization!

Infrastructure expansion is where the money and interest is and is a never ending process as well, so it will keep scaling up in background anyway and will be taken care of diligently, with or without much intervention. Public sector has more of a catalytic and mentoring role to play in that direction. Skill is what we need to focus on today.

Like they say “Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach him how to catch a fish and he will eat for his lifetime”.  Scaled opportunity is what an urban dweller needs irrespective of which Socio-economic strata they belong. More opportunity to masses means more involvement in the urban dynamics, and hence being more engaged in the process of building the very city which provided the new scale and dimensions of opportunities. Scaling of opportunity are less resource intensive and has higher ROR than scaling or urban infrastructure and might be more sustainable an approach!

Further scientific modelling and analysis will be required to validate and assert the idea.  

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Sep 10, 2013

City’s problem isn't congestion; problem is the way we approach to solve the congestion!

Majority of city's problems can be solved by simply restructuring policies, but physical infrastructure is more lucrative an option for many.

You can pump millions of dollars in augmenting and upgrading city infrastructure, of course you should, but city in its functionality will still remain a mess and increasingly convoluted unless you pause and think that what has been wrong with our planning approach, why it is that our planning solutions always seem to lag far behind the pace of growth, is it revenue constraints? No! Is it land constraint? No! It is nothing but common sense deficit. It’s simple, if it doesn’t work go back to the drawing board, put you approach up-side-down or whatever, something different need to be introduced; at least as an experiment.

Our conventional planning approach borrowed from industrial age has remained more or less the same since decades, that is to put it crudely "Planning means addition", more people - let’s make more housing, more congestion - let’s make more flyovers, more heat let’s put more air conditioners and so on.

Buildinganother affordable housing is not a problem but it’s also not the solution. Building another flyover will of course ease the traffic for sometime but it is also not the solution which cities are looking for. The single largest criteria of a livable city can be effortlessness of any city, but effort seems to be the mandate of our city life. 

Have we ever considered why such sheer number of people are heading to metropolis in the first place apart from recreational purposes, it’s not because metropolis provide better employment opportunities, it’s because we simply fail to provide livelihood opportunity in small towns and villages. Can we suggest something to calm down this vary pace of regional population flux, instead of simply focusing on making another housing colony here in every metropolis, can we propose something which will help people earn their livelihood in the place of their choice not only in the place where they often come to struggle and survive.

Have we ever considered before making another flyover that why so many people and car out there on the roads in the first place, is it really necessary in this so called wired era for every single individual to commute to work to accomplish a job, is it that being physically present at a specified location every work weekday is of such monumental importance in a time of century were everyone claim to be virtually connected to everyone and having access to the resources of whole world on their finger tip. Considering this can we suggest something to reduce the very need or frequency of people to come to streets, people who commute to work 5-6 days a week or 24 to 40 hour a week. 

Why people have to waste a substantial portion of their productive lifetime commuting on city roads or tracks, commuting long hours to work mostly doing nothing, may be listening to music or playing video game on their tab, why to commute to work unless they work in a factory like production environment.
You see we are so caught up in the debate of public transport vs. private transit vs. walkability that no one is willing to ask this fundamental question why does every one of you have to commute almost every day for the purpose of work choking almost every street of city, why have we created such system or business environment or society in general. We simply can’t seem to think of any other possibility than expanding infrastructure trying to meet the pressure of self imposed need of commuting for work.

Whether travelling through private or public transport or walking to work, it’s still a waste of precious time, energy and resources. Can you even imaging the lost opportunity cost of millions of people spending several hours commuting to work-home-work almost every day of their productive like. After decades of industrialization is it still so important even today for 200 employees of a random organization to agglomerate everyday at a specific place called office at a specific time to accomplish some work, majority of which can be done from anywhere in the world, majority of which on majority of days does not fundamentally demand physical presence of worker or employee in office. Can’t we instead of simply expanding the city and transport network think of reducing the number and frequency of trip to work? Can’t we think of increasing the share of recreational trip and reducing the work trip instead of aggressively focusing on increasing the share of public transport?

This conventional additive approach of planning is a vicious cycle of inefficiency perceived as virtuous cycle and promoted relentlessly without delving deep into the roots of problem and without pausing and questioning the inertia of planning process. Instead of this additive approach, a supplementary approach of planning is needed for fostering and supporting equitable growth across the region, and at the same time conventional planning wisdom which is dear to many, needto be questioned!


Jul 30, 2013

Conserving inherited heritage - an urgent challenge!

Need of a micro conservation policy. 

We let our inherited ancestral heritage decay, gathering dust and slowly fading away in the oblivion, inheritance sometimes tangible like that beautiful gramophone, that antique classic chair, that vintage album of family photograph or that intricately carved wooden window of ancestral home somewhere in suburb, inheritance at times even intangible like values, culture, stories and learning, family heritage dilapidated usually due to ambiguous responsibility among siblings, lack of time, lack of alacrity and most importantly in absence of micro conservation mechanism, because we feel disoriented and helpless in absence of such mechanism, a guideline, a supportive hand saying "let me help you conserve your family heritage because we know how important it is for you, and equally important for our nation, because these little inherited objects, antiques, collectibles, vintage photographs, values, stories, prose, poetry, proverbs, lessons, and so on make the larger heritage pool of historical cultural and social importance. You can call it “crowd sourcing of heritage” which subsequently contributing to nation's image building, while maintaining a stock of inheritance. 

This micro conservation mechanism should be prepared by government because heritage even individually possessed is something of national value and something to be proud of and something which should be preserved and documented immediately for the future generation. These family heritage need not necessarily be kept in museum just because it’s of national significance, we can rather let them be with those families and individuals who inherited them, but we must make an effort to help them conserve it, governments role can be as a facilitator, trainer, protector, documenter, providing manpower and finance to restore protect and document every piece of family heritage without getting into affairs of taxation and legality, with sole focus of preservation and documentation of objects of historical importance whether for individuals or for nation, documenting design, motifs, techniques, skill set, learning, stories etc. which are going to corrode and disappear in thin air otherwise!

Oct 4, 2012

Sustainable City Graphics 1










Disclaimer - Coca-Cola font / company logo style has been used for the graphics in this blog post with simple aim to create environmental awareness in the world and to promote sustainable urban planning and architectural design practices, considering this effort will only further enhance the image of company as a sustainable brand, in case the use of font/ logo style is felt inappropriate or objectionable by the company they should inform the author to get the graphics removed from the blog and post.  

Apr 15, 2012

Top 100 books of Housing




More coming....

Note: These Books are randomly chosen from an online digital database and has been arranged / composed randomly as well. These ranking are solely as per general judgment of blog author based on visual graphic appeal of book and title catchwords and these ranking does not represent any ranking in literary,  technical or any other sense.  This is only an effort to provide interested users and book lovers, a collection of relevant books and literature at one consolidated place for their ready reference. Further details of individual books are linked to the images. This note is in addition to the disclaimer section of this blog.