Rahul Mehrotra talks to The Hindu about sustainable cities, community participation, and infrastructure. The article also has a review of his most recent book "Architecture in India Since 1990."
Mehrotra argues that community consensus is a necessity in conservation.
"So I think, instead of pitching this debate at the emotive level and using nostalgia as the basis for conservation, we must strategise and use it instead as an instrument to modulate, calibrate and influence the speed of change in our urban environments. "
Mehrota explains how infrastructure is important to "close the loop on the abstraction (and non specificity to form) and the site specificity of architecture."
"In fact, infrastructure is the neutral instrument by which different parts of society relate to each other, it's a shared resource that has not been used strategically by planner; rather infrastructure has been reduced to a service, an amenity."
Read the full story: 'We need community consensus...'
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Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY)
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