Our practice in the fields of urban planning and design focus on improving urban settlements at the regional, city and neighbourhood level though strategic interventions, interdisciplinary collaborations, attention to detail, a rigorous problem solving approach and an ability to fit best practices to local context.
The neighbourhood level interventions are either part of a three tiered urban planning project or specialised solutions for areas that require improvement in terms of mobility, infrastructure, and quality of the public realm. While the solutions are more detailed, the approach of participatory planning, integration and interdisciplinary collaboration remains constant across all our work.
At the core of our architectural design practice is inclusion of the urban poor via truly affordable housing. Our approach is to use our best creative efforts to solve a very important and growing problem in urban India, ranging from site analysis, market studies, design development of the units, blocks and site – landscape and public space design, parking layout design, selection of appropriate material and construction technology, costing and infrastructure design.
Road redevelopment is one of our key interventions and a success story of translation of policy – Tender S.U.R.E street design and procurement guidelines to practice – 150 KM of Tender SURE roads across the country, and growing. Our approach is to address planning of road networks, integration of public transport, organising the underground utilities, improving safety and enhancing the user experience and life cycle of the road, by using a multi-stakeholder approach and a model that is easy to scale.
Our approach to any project is holistic, and that involves working and fixing both the seen and unseen, to de-mystify the complex and create better for the future, especially in terms of fixing the networked infrastructure of a city. This is always invisible and most often ignored in redevelopment projects, but is an important design and engineering aspect in our efforts to create resilient and sustainable cities.
Our approach to landscape design is two fold; The first is to use landscape urbanism as the key tool in the revival and protection of waterways, lakes, wooded areas and other natural assets. The second is to ensure landscape inclusion, in the projects relating to the built environment such as redevelopment of parks, street edge landscape strips, terrace gardens etc. We take pride in ensuring that all existing trees are protected, and new ones planted where possible, in every project.
We believe that food markets are important pieces to fix in the puzzle of getting our city right. With proper planning and design, food markets can streamline production, improve access to fresh produce and reduce the distance from farm to table. This is a response to sustainable goals on three fronts: preserving fertile land around urban settlements; promoting agricultural livelihood; and restoring a prime urban economic and community asset.
Protecting, enhancing and creating natural assets as part of the urban fabric is a key focus of what we do. This ranges from large scale interventions that aim to protect open land and natural reserves via master planning initiatives, to revive and restore waterbodies, to preserve and create parks and gardens in cities to micro interventions of protecting old trees, and adding percolation pits and swales on our streets.