Planning Laws and Planning Practice: Background Note
Nithya Raman

This paper provides a background on planning legislation in India, focusing on laws that control land use and infrastructure provision, and briefly notes how city growth and infrastructure provision diverges from that in practice.

Coping with Change and Insecurity
Nithya Raman

This project attempts to make clearer the relationships between large scale economic and demographic changes, government policies and individual lives through a series of shorter written outputs.

Data gaps in urban informality
Nithya Raman

This study makes a case for more complete documentation of the dynamic interface between city spaces and informal sector workers, primarily made up of the urban poor, and maps some of these patterns for the city of Chennai.

Public consultation for informal sector workers
Nithya Raman

CDF organized a public consultation for informal sector workers so they could contribute to the new City Development Plan for Chennai.

Understanding planning processes: Concept Note
Nithya Raman

Unlike most contemporary approaches to urban governance in India, this project documents the differences between planning processes on paper and in reality from a micro level. We hope to understand with this work how the incentives of individual actors in cities are shaped in a way that contributes to large scale outcome failures.