• Cycling in 'The Maidan' in Kolkata

    Covid Galvanizes Kolkata’s Cycling Community

    Covid left streets relatively clear of traffic, emboldening Calcutta's cyclists who have been banned since 2014 from the 64 arterial roads by the West Bengal government and Kolkata Police. A keen proponent of cycle-safe infrastructure in the City of Joy is Sukrit Sen, Placemaking India's Bengal Hub leader, who takes us on a whirlwind tour of his favourite spots in Kolkata on his bicycle.

  • Rights to the City

    Rights to the City and The Adda Experiment

    A foursome of 20-something architects struggled against the odds to give rights to the city to a neglected community in an affluent neighbourhood of the nation's Capital.

  • placemaking in south Asia

    Placemaking in South Asia: The Urban Jam Series

    Placemaking in South Asia shares a common history, culture and ecology. In collaboration with Peacemakers Pakistani, Placemaking India kicked off a year-long series of online conversations beginning and concluding on Independence Day under Urban Jam, an initiative for collective learning with the Indic diaspora. The objective of the series was to find common ground on urban issues and engage in mutual discovery of the opportunities and challenges of the public realm in pairs of cities across the border.

  • Cycling

    Cycling Accelerates India’s Green Shift

    Cycling as a way of escaping domestic confinement during the first lockdown fortuitously translated for Placemaking India's Chennai-based Cycling Ambassador, Venugopal AV, into supporting a mission to make the non-motorised two-wheeler a more visible and substantial fixture in the modal mix on India's thoroughfares.

  • tactical urbanism - women walking down the footpath beside the tactical intervention of a seating arrangement in front of a restaurant on the crosscut street in coimbatore

    Coimbatore Creates Case for Tactical Urbanism

    Tactical urbanism faces its share of challenges. Kovai's super-busy Cross Cut Road got an exuberant makeover, when Placemaking India's Tamilnadu Hub Leader, Pavithra Sriram of Design Co:Lab implemented a design brief by IBI Group to create room for shoppers and cyclists to use the road safely.

“Build Back Better” is a policy slogan that has had a lot of currency in the last year and in fact was the rallying cry of the 2020 Joe Biden campaign.

For the World Bank, the path to “resilient recovery” follows these steps: (1) humanitarian relief, (2) restoration of basic services, (3) reconstruction and asset recovery, and (4) building back better, to improve existing systems.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) also invoked the phrase BBB late last year in the context of post-COVID-19 relief. The OECD encourages governments to respond to today’s global environmental threats like climate change and biodiversity loss as they get back on their feet through recovery packages. Covid-19 recovery and green recovery are concurrent problems that are part of a unified problem. The OECD warns of greater social and economic damage due to neglecting those issues.

“A central dimension of building back better is the need for a people-centred recovery that focuses on well-being, improves inclusiveness and reduces inequality.”

Placemaking India’s proposition is to “Unbuild Back Better,” which puts not so much major physical infrastructure but small-scale interventions, communities and ecology at the heart of recovery.

Our series of blogs, powered by The Smart Citizen, showcases the ideas and heroic work of members and partners before and during the pandemic in India. Many extended themselves with humanitarian relief but some also continued to work strategically towards health, equity and inclusion in the public realm.