Artwork by Rashi Jain
From conversation on:
Sep 04, 2022
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What does it take to design, create, and settle a city? Humankind has resolved these questions in varying epochs and geographical contexts, very differently, when looked into the details of — and through all these brilliant ways of becoming, we have shaped our worlds today- in the charming cities and towns we inhabit. Human colonies have been an intriguing subject not because the idea is new, but precisely the opposite— making it quite a rare definition of ‘interesting’ in the current day of rapidly growing areas of interest and applications. Hereby, the ideas of civil engineering, city planning, urban planning, traffic control, and pedestrian safety are only some of the ideas that come in the same gamut — the ideas that we were able to discuss with Prof. Geetam Tiwari, a distinguished expert in the field, and currently a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. In our conversation with her, we traveled along the curious pathways leading to a fundamental understanding of the shaping of city spaces, in context with the historical pillars of human settlements, as well as the ones that we inhabit currently across different continents and socio-economic influences among other multifarious factors that make the discipline fascinating beyond measure. As is largely true with our everyday life this discussion sheds some nurturing rays of revelation on why our everyday cities and towns look the way they do — the details that we forget to notice, and what goes into thinking and making such a complex organism — a city itself. Take the plunge and discover more about this fascinating topic here!
After my Ph.D. when I returned to India, I realised that the theories we were taught still work. The technical part that you learn is always valid but then, when you look around and apply those first principles to things that are happening around you - you get a lot of interesting insights which you do not find in the textbooks.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Prof. Geetam Tiwari TRIPP Chair Professor, Department of Civil Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
Prof. Geetam Tiwari completed her Bachelors of Architecture from the University of Roorkee in 1980, and then went on to pursue Master of urban planning and policy from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She continued there for her PhD in public policy analysis with the specialisation in transport planning. She joined the Civil Engineering department at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi in 1990, where she currently is the TRIPP Chair Professor. Prof. Tiwari's areas of research and work that have impacted the current cities very directly. These ideas span across the wide areas of transport planning and modelling, traffic engineering, planning of public transport systems, urban planning, and urban traffic safety - to name a few major themes that her projects very adroitly address. Her extremely rich experiences across different continents and brilliant insights amalgamate beautifully to give way to the new understandings that we had the fortune of discussing with her over an illuminating conversation.