A. G. Krishna Menon

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Departments of Architecture and Urban Design, School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi, India

Email: agkrishnamenon@gmail.com

ABSTRACT  Urban planning in India is heir to a colonial paradigm that imposed practices developed from the experiences of Western urbanisation to the local Indian context. This paper suggests that this paradigm exacerbates the complex problems of contemporary urbanisation, but there is little attempt among Indian urban planners to acknowledge and address the consequences of their colonial legacy. The forces of globalisation are reinforcing this postcolonial intellectual malaise by reposing greater faith in capital- and technology-intensive solutions to solve problems instead of reforming the inherited processes of urban management. This paper argues that the nascent field of urban conservation in India offers the potential to review the dominant paradigms of urban planning and develop more context-specific and appropriate strategies for tackling the problems of Indian urbanisation.

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KEYWORDS  historic space, historic metropolitan context, evolution, reflection

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Received July 5, 2017; accepted July 25, 2017

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