Physical Address
304 North Cardinal St.
Dorchester Center, MA 02124
Liberalizing Cities
From The Ground Up
Two useful resources came across my desk this week. From Sargun Kaur and Bhuvana Anand, an analysis of recent building reforms in eight Indian states – not all of which succeeded in expanding the practically buildable space. They use a…
A Vietnamese business paper provides a fascinating window on land prices – official versus market – in an economy that has partially transitioned from socialism to markets: Hanoi has been collecting public feedback on its first-ever land price list, set…
Check out Alain Bertaud's Master Class lecture at CEPT University in Ahmedabad, India.
In Mumbai, there is a specific type of architect who has become the interpreter of regulations and there are those architects who are aestheticians working on building skins. As much as there is convenience in this split, it has taken away a big part of the agency of the architects in the city.
Most master plans are a costly effort by a team of temporary consultants, spread over two to three years, to prepare a blueprint that is usually obsolete as soon as it is completed.
Promotors of recently developed cities ranging from Nusantara, the freshly built capital of Indonesia, to Neom, Saudi Arabia’s futurist urban paradise, advertise them as breakthroughs in urban living. But does the world need new cities?
Alain Bertaud revisits a Mumbai development project he helped design in 1983. The neighborhood is thriving.
Three cool sites for data and visualizations
A 2017 increase in allowed floor area ratio in Mumbai had a tremendous impact on affordability by accidentally improving the economics of smaller apartments.
How do urbanists respond to a disaster? Emails from Brazil's Rodrigo Rocha show innovation and personal resilience in the face of crisis.
