National Institute of Advanced Studies

Urban and Mobility Studies Programme 

Invites you to a Public Lecture Series entitled

City at its Limits

The First lecture will be delivered by

 Sri Prem Chandavarkar

Managing Partner, CnT Architects, Bengaluru

on

The Smart City and the Indian Urban Condition

Chairperson: Prof. Carol Upadhya, NIAS

Date:               Friday, 3rd November 2017

Time:               6:00 PM (Coffee/Tea at 5.30 PM)

Venue:             Lecture Hall, NIAS

Abstract:   The Government of India started openly discussing the concept of the smart city in 2014, and the Smart City Mission was formally launched in 2015.  While international discourse on the smart city revolves around ICT (Information and Communication Technologies) and IoT (Internet of Things) technologies, the Smart City Mission in India is evasive in making a commitment to any specific definition of the smart city.

The presentation will examine possible reasons for this evasiveness, and the challenges it poses in any critical examination of the Smart City Mission.  Rather than focusing on the question of whether the smart city is a good idea, it will be argued that the more important question is “Are we ready for the smart city?”  This will be examined from the perspective of three dimensions:

1.         The Imagination of the Indian City

2.         The History of Governance of the Indian City

3.         Privacy and the Indian City

About the Speaker: Prem Chandavarkar is the managing partner of CnT Architects: an award-winning and widely published architectural practice based in Bangalore, India. He received his training at School of Planning and Architecture Delhi (B.Arch., 1978) and University of Oregon USA (M.Arch., 1982).

He is a former Executive Director of Srishti School of Art Design & Technology in Bangalore, and is an academic advisor and guest faculty at Indian and international colleges of architecture.  In 2016, he was the Walton Critic at The School of Architecture and Planning at Catholic University of America in Washington DC.  In the same year, he was appointed as a member of the board of The Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum, USA.  He is a member of the current Executive Committee of Indian Institute of Architects Karnataka Chapter, and was the curator of the centenary year National Convention of the Indian Institute of Architects, on the theme “Imagining the Indian City”.

Besides his design practice at CnT, Prem Chandavarkar writes, lectures and blogs on architecture, urbanism, art, cultural studies, philosophy, politics and education.

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All are cordially invited

For further information, please contact. Dr. Hemangini Gupta <NIASurban@gmail.com>