[from LAF News Blog]

In mid-November, I traveled to Delhi, India with UVA professor Peter Waldman to attend a U21-sponsored conference. U21 is an international network of 23 universities who engage in research collaborations, together and with cities and environments around the world, that facilitate several ongoing projects, including the Water Futures for Sustainable Cities Project. Our focus was Theme 2, restoration/rehabilitation of urban river corridors – in this case, the Yamuna River, a tributary of the Ganges. The conference brought together geomorphologists, statisticians, environmental scientists, and students at Delhi University to study the Yamuna through hydrological, quantitative, and qualitative and cultural lenses. As designers, Professor Waldman and I were to address the role of architecture and landscape architecture as agents and products of urbanization, and the opportunity of our disciplines to negotiate the intersection of urbanization processes with ecological and geological processes. For our 72 hours in India, the most succinct observation I have is: India is a place of many, many contrasts.

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