Housing and Landscape Urbanisation: A Case in Kolhapur’s Extents

Author: Aditya Mahajan
Site Location: Kolhapur, Maharashtra
Institute: School of Environment and Architecture (SEA)
Advisor: Prasad Shetty

Description

Complexities of land, caste-based segregation, people’s agency, agriculture, and industries give rise to a distinct urban and house form within city extents. These forces led to questions about life and space, intervening through diverse socio-political and environmental logics. The architectural inquiry is therefore about thinking of inhabitation forms where space emerges through fragmentation, accretion, and the ideas of permanence and impermanence.
Based on a thorough analysis of the biographies of resident families, the design imagines a housing and landscape urbanisation project driven by the community. It intervenes through planning, rethinking builtforms, and inserting infrastructural landscapes. By understanding ways of homemaking, it derives a proportioning system and stratifies the terrain into habitations.
Analysing land conditions, affordances, transformations, and intensification of homes, the project suggests a strategy for planning and rebuilding, estimated over the next 15 years, to improve living conditions. The proportioning system is developed into household modules, which can be permutated, appropriated, and grown over time by arranging them in various ways. Made with steel, reinforced fiber panels, and patra, they are meticulously designed with proportional sizes, proper ventilation, play of spatial syntax and volumes, ensuring costeffectiveness. Furthermore, the site systems can be configured to create varying degrees of publicness.

Drawings

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Generative Design for Traditional Communities: From Roots to Resilience

Posted on September 2, 2025September 4, 2025 Posted in Charles Correa Gold Medal 2025Tagged Adequate Housing GM, Generative Design GM, HOUSING GM, incremental housing GM, Neighbourhood GM, Participatory Design GM, Participatory Planning GM, Residential GM, resilient architecture GM, Social Design GM, Urban Design GMLeave a comment

Author: Vidulla Ghodekar
Site Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra
Institute: Pillai College of Architecture
Advisor: Neha Sayed

Description

Chimbai is a quaint coastal village nestled in Bandra, Mumbai, home to diverse fishing communities, including Hindu, Kathiawadi and East Indian families. Once characterised by low-rise Koli houses and a close-knit fishing community, it has gradually transformed from single-storey dwellings to a mix of contemporary structures. This shift has altered the traditional fabric of the community and attracted a more diverse population.
In the recent years, the community has begun rebuilding their houses, resulting in haphazard development that lacks any character or identity. Such conditions may draw the attention of the authorities and risk rehabilitation of the community due to high land value.
The generatives design process empowers the community by letting them decide the development process. It supports them in rebuilding their homes through design guidelines that address existing issues while preserving the socio-cultural identity of the village. This process allows residents to develop their houses at their own pace, enabling Chimbai to evolve organically over time. It will also invite people from all walks of life to explore the seafront, its cuisine and culture, thereby boosting the local economy.
This approach presents a model for community-led regeneration in rapidly urbanising cities, where architecture is rooted in people, place and purpose.

Drawings

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Aasara: Threads of Shelter — Weaving Waste into Urban Renewal

Posted on September 2, 2025September 2, 2025 Posted in Charles Correa Gold Medal 2025Tagged Adequate Housing GM, incremental housing GM, Neighbourhood GM, Residential GMLeave a comment

Author: S. Aishwarrya Shre
Site Location: Deonar, Mumbai, Maharashtra
Institute: Acharya’s NRV School of Architecture
Advisor: Gracy H David

Description

Aasara is a human-centric design proposal that rethinks slum redevelopment beyond the conventional high-rise resettlements. Rooted in empathy and lived experience, the project draws from the social, cultural, and economic rhythms of informal communities—where the idea of home extends beyond shelter to livelihood, identity, and belonging.
Set within the dense fabric of Mumbai’s informal settlements, Aasara adopts a bottom-up, participatory approach that places people at the heart of the process. It addresses two pressing urban challenges—housing insecurity and solid waste—by upcycling materials like plastic-sand composites and construction debris into resilient, low-cost building components.
The design proposes modular housing clusters built around shaded courtyards to foster community interaction, safety, and microeconomics. Passive climate strategies and shared infrastructure promote comfort and inclusivity. Every detail—material, form, and spatial relationship—emerges from local context and need.
Aasara is not merely a housing solution but a call for systemic change—where architecture becomes a tool of empowerment. It envisions cities where waste is reimagined as opportunity, and the most marginalized are uplifted through dignified, climate-responsive design. Aasara stands as an assertion that true sustainability begins with compassion and context.

Drawings

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AABHAS – A Sense of Home: A Sustainable Model for Migrant Construction Workers

Posted on September 2, 2025September 2, 2025 Posted in Charles Correa Gold Medal 2025Tagged Adequate Housing GM, incremental housing GM, Residential GM, Social Design GM1 Comment

Author: Pranjal Prakash Tak
Site Location: Navi Mumbai, Maharashtra
Institute: Rachana Sansad’s Academy of Architecture
Advisor: Ar. Ashley Fialho

Description

They raise our skylines, yet sleep under tarps. Their homes are temporary, their futures uncertain. With no access to stable housing, education, or safe spaces, migrant construction workers and their families remain on the margins-building the nation while being denied a place within it.

This thesis is a response to that silence-a call to rebuild what’s been forgotten. It proposes modular, mobile housing units that are scalable, stackable, and site-adaptable. But it’s more than shelter, it’s an ecosystem that includes classrooms, medical rooms, and women-centric spaces, designed to empower and uplift.

A replicable solution that moves with the workers, grows with them, and offers not just homes, but hope.

This project envisions a future, where the hands that build our cities are finally given a foundation of their own.

Rooted in empathy and inspired by the diverse cultural and religious lives of migrant workers from Bihar, UP, Jharkhand, Odisha and beyond, the prototype re-imagines shelter as a shared ecosystem of identity, safety, and celebration. Co-creation with workers informed both private spaces, which respect family structures and rituals, and common areas like courtyards and street edges, which act as cultural bridges-hosting shared meals, celebrations, and conversations

By centering the needs of those most often ignored-women, children, the displaced-this is not just a model for housing, but a manifesto for justice. This is not just about building better homes. It’s about building a more adaptable and humane society.

Drawings

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Charles Correa Foundation

Tag: incremental housing GM

Aasara: Threads of Shelter — Weaving Waste into Urban Renewal

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