Development Urbanism
Talk
1.5 hrs
February 01, 2015 7:00 pm Sunday
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Development urbanism - an alternative to the "smart city" concept. - a Talk by Henrik Valeur.

History bears out that urbanization can be used as a means of lifting people out of poverty. But can it also be a means for building up understanding, care and respect for other human beings and for nature?

The processes of urbanization are complex and dynamic. We should not pretend to be able to control them – or even to predict their outcome, which will be determined by an infinite number of individual circumstances, causes and motivations. But this does not mean that we should refrain from trying to push and influence the development in a certain direction. Pushing the development in a more “sustainable” direction will require a more holistic and collaborative approach that would allow for a more comprehensive understanding of both the problems and the possibilities.

Henrik Valeur will discuss some of the problems related to the urban transition of India, including the air pollution, the contamination and depletion of fresh water resources, the precarious food situation, the lack of proper housing, and various environmental and human health problems related to motorized transportation. He will also propose a number of possible solutions, including the use of plants and natural ventilation to create clean indoor air, the revitalization of an existing system of water canals, the creation of vertical kitchen gardens in a rehabilitation colony, a strategy for making an entire neighborhood car-free and a design for self-designed, low-cost housing.

Henrik Valeur is an architect-urbanist, an independent researcher and the founder and creative director of UiD – a networking urban consultancy and a pioneer organization in the field of collaborative and participatory planning and design. As the curator of the Danish pavilion at the Architecture Biennale in Venice in 2006, he conceived and orchestrated the project, CO-EVOLUTION: Danish/Chinese Collaboration on Sustainable Urban Development in China, which was awarded the Golden Lion for Best National Pavilion. He recently published the book India: the Urban Transition – a Case Study of Development Urbanism, which is based on his experiences teaching, researching and practicing in India since 2010. The book was commended by the distinguished Indian architect Rahul Mehrotra, Prof. and Chair of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University, who said: "The fine grain reading of issues in the Indian city is an important contribution so is the attempt to connect so many dots to make sense of the moving targets we encounter in Urbanism in India.”

Entry - Free

Organizer
Hyderabad Urban Lab
HUL works along two interrelated lines of engagements and commitments. One is a a creative, but academically rigorous multidisciplinary line of research on urbanization. This would include geography, history, economics, sociology, anthropology, etc. The other is community engagement through participatory action, teaching and training. At HUL, we focus on land, labour and capital as key themes through which to try to generate knowledge about the city. For example, when we think about waste, we do so by asking questions like – where exactly is waste generated? where is it dumped? why doesnt the city have land for local decentralized waste-management? and so on; we also ask who the people handling, collecting, removing, transporting and processing waste are and why and under what conditions they do it. And, of course, we also ask who pays for what parts of this work, who makes profits and how, and so on. In general, we see all projects as attempts to create what we call new communities of practice. That is, groups of people with shared social practices, whether it be map-making or lake bund cleanups or local surveys or story telling. We need to create new skill sets for people in order to live better in our cities and that is the idea of this lab – to borrow a metaphor, making social mashups.