Gandhi and architecture : a time for low cost housing Gandhi and Architecture: A Time for Low Cost Housing chronicles the emergence of a low cost low rise housing architecture that conforms to M.K. Gandhis religio philosophical emphasis on the necessity of establishing limits in everyday actions. This book approaches the making of a Gandhian low cost housing architecture of finitude as an enduring present. Drawing from rich archival and field materials the book explores Gandhis religiosity and the British Spiritualist Madeline Slades creation of his low cost hut Adi Niwas in the village of Segaon in the 1930s. Adi Niwas inaugurates a low cost housing architecture of finitude founded on Gandhian ideals of self sacrifice and limited means. Successive generations in post colonial India have reimagined a secular necessity for this low cost housing architecture of finitude. In the early 1950s era of mass housing for post partition refugees from Pakistan the making of a low cost housing architecture was premised on the necessity of responding to economic concerns and to an emerging demographic mandate. In the 1970s during the Oil and Petroleum Exporting Countries crisis it was premised on the rise of urban and climatological necessities. More recently in the late 1990s and early 2000s its reception has been premised on the emergence of language based identitarianism in Wardha Maharashtra. Each of these moments of necessity reveals the enduring present of a Gandhian low cost housing architecture of finitude. This volume is a critical intervention in the philosophy of architectural history. Drawing eclectically from science and technology studies political science housing studies urban studies and anthropology this richly illustrated volume will be of great interest to students and researchers of architecture and design housing history sociology economics Gandhian studies urban studies and development studies