Vitasta Raina on "Smart Urban Futures: The Liveable City of New India"

International Authors editor and author of the novella Writer's Block, Vitasta Raina has recently written on the psychological fragmentation of the contemporary Indian urban landscape. According to Ms. Raina, this fragmentation represents a key challenge to creating a new (and needed) urban plan--a plan that, she believes, must be central to Modern India's search for identity. I should add that her analyses of India's contemporary urban scene foreshadows larger issues that, in future, we should expect to see globally:

The instability of identities demonstrated in the dichotomies of rural vs. urban, public vs. private, eastern vs. western, formal vs. informal, realty vs. architecture, politico-economics vs. grass root societies, etc. have created divisions and segregations within the urban realm making cities unsafe experiences for the mass of inhabitants.

Our cities have thus emerged as non-places in the grey areas between accident and design, between ethnicity and genderlessness, being led by forward thinkers motivated by tradition. The dynamics of contemporary Indian urbanism, the physical needs and social characteristics of urban Indian societies and the interactions of the inhabitants with the built-environment has essentially never been defined.

Complicating the situation, increases in population "could lead to a collapse of Urban India, even before it has fully risen."

To read more of Ms. Raina's analyses and solutions for India's architectural and urban planning challenges, please click HERE.

Vitasta Raina