Scientific Ideation Towards Visionary Development Strategies for Indian Urban Environments

The aim of development projects encompassing the urban built environment is to ensure a better quality of life for citizens in the present and for the foreseeable future. Broadly, these involve redevelopment, conservation and renewal in the brownfield realm and infrastructural improvements and new area developments in the greenfield sector. The process involves understanding the needs of the built environment and proposing interventions through a process of dialogue among city planners, urban designers, architects, financial planners, government officials and public and private stakeholders. While most public agencies rely on precedent while envisioning new development projects, visionary thinking often evolves from sustained intellectual effort. The aim of this paper which is aligned to the Indian context is to establish a case for: (i) Inclusion of academics and researchers in the consultative process towards a more intellectual framework while arriving at solutions to issues confronting the built environment, (ii) Creating a dialogue among institutional researchers, government development bodies and people’s representatives towards mutual understanding of concerns, (iii) Facilitating the access of researchers to administrative processes and operational logistics to enable teaching universities to provide more relevant education to students, (iv) Sharing research studies with urban development agencies to provide ideas for possible implementation. The importance of academic inputs in large developments projects is highly significant. Any large projects such as new town developments, area redevelopment projects and urban renewal initiatives need a significant amount of intellectual application before design proposals are envisaged and executed.