Team Herald
PANJIM: The Charles Correa Foundation (CCF) is organizing a three-day conference at Kala Academy in Goa from September 6-8 which will see experts from all over the world discussing the designing of equitable cities. This will be the third time when the CCF will organize such an event and the Foundation is expecting participation of nearly a thousand professionals for the event which is called Z-Axis 2018.
CCF is an initiative of internationally renowned architect and urban planner Charles Correa. Speaking at a press conference, the director of CCF, Ms Nondita Correa Mehrotra said that, “Charles Correa started the Foundation to address the fact that many valuable ideas originated by citizens interested in improving their built environment do not see the light of day. There exist few support systems to provide the incubation period ideas need to be developed, and there is no clear path to gain the attention of a governmental or private implementing agency. Therefore, CCF acts as a catalyst for architectural, urban design, planning, and community-based projects that improve the condition of human settlements in India.”
The Z-Axis 2018 conference themed “Designing Equitable Cities” aims at a worldwide analysis of equity, ways in which it can be maintained and ways in which it has been vandalized due to sociological, economic, political and cultural hierarchies. The analysis shall be followed by explanations of various interventions that try and address the problems at hand.
The conference will shed light on a very relevant topic for the Indian subcontinent, culminating in an event that highlights the subliminal problem of equity, ways in which it manifests itself and how they have been dealt with in a diverse landscape all over the globe by practitioners from diverse fields of work. The strength of the conference lies in its ability to provide such a diverse understanding to such a large audience over a span of only three days.
Students, institutes, government officials and professionals from fields ranging from architecture, urban planning, law and order, policy and transportation, among others, are welcome to attend the conference and involve themselves in the matters related to equity by way of lectures, films and panel discussions. “By way of this conference, we aim at educating the delegates about the relevance of equitability in our cities, we hope to bring the seemingly invisible problem to the center and help discuss viable solutions, based on examples portrayed by our speakers. We hope to encourage a city level and eventually national level of thinking and incorporation of equitable terms of development in future endeavors across multiple fields,” added Ms Nondita Correa Mehrotra.
Such deliberation and discussion is required as according to the census of 2001-11 the urban population is growing at a faster pace than the rural. For the first time since Independence, India’s urban population has registered a higher increase than the numbers added in rural areas. In percentage terms, the urban population grew by 31.8 per cent, which was 2.6 times the corresponding decadal rise of 12.18 per cent for the rural population.
According to the Census data, out of the country’s total population of 1,210.19 million in 2011, 377.11 million or 31.16 per cent is living in urban areas. In 2001, the share of the urban population was 27.82 per cent (286.12 million out of 1,028.61 million).
The conference will be attended by big-wigs like Mr Gautam Patel, Judge, High Court of Bombay, Mumbai, Mr Richard Burdett, Professor of Urban Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science, Mr Rahul Mehrotra, Mr Mohan Rao, the principal designer of the Bengaluru-based multi-disciplinary consultancy practice, Integrated Design (INDÉ) etc.
