B. R Balachandran in Conversation with Bimal Patel: Planning the City for an Unpredictable Future

Bimal Patel is an architect, urbanist and academic. He is President of CEPT University. He also heads HCP which is a multi-disciplinary design, planning and management practice based in Ahmedabad. Bimal Patel's research focuses on architecture and urban planning, real estate markets, regulatory frameworks and land management. He has won numerous awards including the Aga Khan Award for Architecture (1992). In 2019 he was awarded the Padma Shri, one of India's highest civilian honours. B.R. Balachandran is an urban planner with over 25 years of experience, currently engaged in doctoral research at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. After 10 years at Environmental Planning Collaborative, Ahmedabad, in 2007, he co-founded Alchemy Urban Systems, a planning practice in Bangalore and also served in senior advisory roles at institutions such as CDD Society, BORDA and ITDP. While engaged in research on post-disaster recovery in the US, he has continued to work on planning projects in India. In this episode, Bimal Patel and B.R. Balachandran discuss why planning in India struggles to deal with the inherent unpredictability of the future. They look at how plans are excessively deterministic and why they take refuge in a "predict and provide" approach. Bimal argues that conventional plans delusively seek stable outcomes, while economies are always in flux. Such attitudes have been the primary reasons for dysfunctional cities. Later in the conversation, they explore a practical and meaningful approach to planning in the face of unpredictability, identifying the critical elements that need to be planned and others that need to be flexible.