page_title: Henrik Valeur
section_title: India
hierarchical_section_title: Henrik Valeur / Career / India
caption_attribution_description: English: Henrik Valeur in a discussion with the Chief Architect of Chandigarh, Ms. Sumit Kaur, on the Car Free Sector Proposal, at Chief Architect's Office in Sector 9, Chandigarh
context_page_description: Henrik Bjørn Valeur is a Danish architect-urbanist, founder and creative director of UiD and UiD Shanghai Co., Ltd, curator of CO-EVOLUTION: Danish/Chinese Collaboration on Sustainable Urban Development in China, which was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2006, and author of the book India: the Urban Transition - a Case Study of Development Urbanism, which is based on his experiences teaching, researching and practicing in India.
context_section_description: In 2010 Henrik Valeur gave the Le Corbusier Memorial Lecture in Chandigarh, in which he noted that:
  “The problem with modernist architecture is not only that it tries to erase the past; it also obstructs the future!”
  In the following years he worked with Indian students and researchers, activists and bureaucrats, developers and entrepreneurs, and participated in public discussions about the urban transition of India. His book India: the Urban Transition - a Case Study of Development Urbanism, which is based on his teaching, researching and practicing, primarily in Chandigargh in North India and Bangalore in South India, was published in 2014. "The book contextualises city making as a complex highly political process and contends that it is the Indian city that can truly be the landscape on which the idea of India, with its diversity, flourishes".
  The Indian architect Rahul Mehrotra, Professor and then Chair of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University, called the book “an important contribution” because of its “fine grain reading of issues in the Indian city” and its “attempt to connect so many dots to make sense of the moving targets we encounter in Urbanism in India".
  One of the projects featured in the book is a proposal to make one of the sectors of Chandigarh car-free. Though initially commissioned by the Chief Architect of Chandigarh for the new master plan of the city, the proposal was not realized despite the fact that the Punjab and Haryana High Court subsequently directed the City Administration to make one of its sectors car-free.
  A project for the businessman and environmentalist Kamal Meattle uses natural ventilation and “growing fresh air” with plants in a vertical greenhouse to improve indoor air quality in an office building.
  Other projects include a proposal for vertical kitchen gardens in a colony of rehabilitated slum dwellers in Chandigarh, developed in collaboration with a local NGO, and a proposal for self-built low-cost garden flats for current slum dwellers in Bangalore, developed with a local developer. In Chandigarh the lack of open space in the colony led to the idea of placing community kitchen gardens on top of each other. In Bangalore residents would be provided an open frame structure to be filled out by themselves according to individual preferences and possibilities. The reasoning for both projects, i.e. to provide poor people in urban settings with opportunities to produce their own food and to create their own dwellings respectively, owes a debt to the Indian economist Amartya Sen’s capability approach.
  With experiences from both China and India, Henrik Valeur asks whether India can “use urbanization as a driver of economic, human and social development like China has done?”
caption: Henrik Valeur in a discussion with the Chief Architect of Chandigarh, Ms. Sumit Kaur, on the Car Free Sector Proposal, at Chief Architect's Office in Sector 9, Chandigarh
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