Urban Design Collective
Nischal R Buddhavarapu
“Your Fly Is Down!!!” – That & Other Important Things You Should Know While Teaching A Class…
Teaching is a weird thing to do. Especially at the collegiate level, where one must nonchalantly address a mass of humanity that you cannot identify and that barely recognises you a member of it’s own species. To do this is daunting enough; but to do it well is almost impossible. Nonetheless an increasing number of … Continue reading
A Brief History Of A Possible Future
This is a version of an essay I wrote in the months after the 2015 Chennai Floods for the SAP Chronicle at the request of a few of my students. I’ve expanded it significantly here… After the rains of 2015, the City Of Chennai wakes up and smells its proverbial coffee. The first thing they … Continue reading
The Teaching Of Cities…
There is a question that digs at the soul of anyone who ventures into a classroom facing a chalk board filled with emptiness. But I’ll get to that later. Source : http://www.wikipedia.org It begins with you searching for an opening into a chamber. The entries are usually located at the rear or on the sides … Continue reading
“Because I Would Not Stop For Death…”
Henri Cartier Bresson’s famous photographs of Mahatma Gandhi’s Funeral A man died recently. My father had known him for many years. The man was one of his mentors and had helped him professionally on occasion. I had met him many times. I liked him. I heard the news from my father over the phone; he … Continue reading
Having Writ…
How do you write about a city or The City or cities in general? A particular set of words, organised a particular way, produce beauty. It is that simple. And that complex. Source :http://www.en.wikipedia.org The act of writing is not an easy one. It took our species hundreds of thousands of years to begin and … Continue reading
Jane Jacobs WALKED! (and so did we…)
This is an account of UDC’s Jane Jacob Walk at Chennai on 5th May 2013 at Georgetown. Any chuckles resulting from reading this are purely accidental. Cities stand still. Not metaphorically of course, but physically. So really, the only way you get to see them is to move within them. You could drive a car, … Continue reading
A Density Of Quality
In their seminal book on cities, “FARMAX”; the Dutch architects MVRDV make the observation that Asian cities are usually two sets of urbanisms juxtaposed upon each other. The first, a Planned City; designed and planned by governments and other institutions; and a second (perhaps more vital) city; formed by the pragmatic necessities of context and demand, … Continue reading
The Whereness Of Cities
Tautological as the statement sounds; Cities are places. It is an oft forgotten reality that urbanism is a phenomena that is as much geographical as it is cultural and economic. The location and geography of a City is critical to its form, its flows, exchanges and its transformations; perhaps more significantly than other conditions that … Continue reading
The Absence Of Presence
I have been thinking about the things we never get back in Cities and Life. This is what I wrote about it. Courtesy : http://www.go-nxg.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/chennaicitypage_10art10_go5199h7v119nxg_woodlands.jpg The great critic Roger Ebert is dead. With him, have gone my Thursday nights; or at least what I used to do with them. For the last … Continue reading
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Urban Design Collective 
