B. R Balachandran in Conversation with Bimal Patel: Making Implementable Plans

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 the fifth and final episode of their series of conversations on making city planning work in India, Dr. Bimal Patel and B.R. Balachandran discuss why city planners in India are often resigned to not seeing their plans implemented despite numerous experiences to the contrary. They discuss three important aspects of making implementable plans: (i) ensuring that plans are fair and equitable in distributing the costs and benefits of planning; (ii) working with the political process of planning, communicating plans effectively, engaging in dialogue and negotiating with stakeholders and (iii) focusing on raising resources for implementing the plans. In the end, they recap the main elements of the whole podcast series.