African Centre for Cities

PUBLIC LECTURE: Soft Thresholds - RMA Architects, Mumbai by Rahul Mehrotra
2018-07-31 16:00 - 17:30 (Africa/Johannesburg) | Centre of the Book, 62 Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town, 8001, South Africa
Rahul Mehrotra, Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, will give a public lecture entitled Soft Thresholds – RMA Architects, Mumbai, co-hosted by African Centre for Cities, UCT Architecture, Planning and Geomatics, UWC Centre for Humanities Research and Wolff Architects.
Mehrotra, who recently received a Special Mention at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, is a practicing architect, urban designer, and educator. His Mumbai-based firm, RMA Architects, was founded in 1990 and has designed and executed projects including government and private institutions, corporate workplaces, private homes, and unsolicited projects driven by the firm’s commitment to advocacy in the city of Mumbai. The firm has designed a software campus for Hewlett Packard in Bangalore, a campus for Magic Bus (a NGO that works with poor children), led the restoration of the Chowmahalla Palace in Hyderabad, and formulated a conservation master plan for the Taj Mahal with the Taj Mahal Conservation Collaborative. The firm also recently designed and built a social housing project for 100 elephants and their caretakers in Jaipur as well as a corporate office in Hyderabad. The firm has designed several single family houses in different parts of India and one in Karachi, Pakistan.

Recently, Mehrotra completed the Lab of the Future on the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland and in 2015 was a finalist in an international design competition for the Museum of Modern Art in Sydney.
Mehrotra has written and lectured extensively on issues to do with architecture, conservation, and urban planning and design in Mumbai and India. His writings include coauthoring Bombay: The Cities Within, which covers the city’s urban history from the 1600s to the present; Banganga: Sacred Tank; Public Places Bombay; Anchoring a City Line, A history of the city’s commuter railway; and Bombay to Mumbai: Changing Perspectives. He has also coauthored Conserving an Image Center: The Fort Precinct in Bombay. Based on this study and its recommendations, the historic Fort District in Mumbai was declared a conservation precinct in 1995 – a first such designation in India. In 2000, he edited a book for the Union of International Architects, which earmarks the end of the last century and is titled The Architecture of the 20th Century in the South Asian Region. In 2011, Mehrotra wrote Architecture in India – Since 1990, which is a reading of contemporary architecture in India which he extended through an exhibition he cocurated titled The State of Architecture: Practices and Processes in India, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai in Jan 2016. This was followed in 2018 by an exhibition titled: The State of Housing : Realities, Aspirations and imaginaries in India which showed between Jan and March 2018 and will travel over the next two years in India.

Mehrotra is a member of the steering committee of the South Asia Institute at Harvard. In 2012-2015, he led a Harvard University-wide research project with Professor Diana Eck, called The Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City. This work was published as a book in 2014. This research was extended in 2017 in the form of a book titled Does Permanence Matter? Mehrotra’s latest co- authored book is titled Taj Mahal : Multiple Narratives which was published in Dec 2017. His current research is on the small towns and emerging urban conglomerations in India and is expected to be published as book in late 2018.
Rahul Mehrotra has long been actively involved in civic and urban affairs in Mumbai, having served on commissions for the conservation of historic buildings and environmental issues, with various neighbourhood groups and, from 1994 to 2004, as Executive Director of the Urban Design Research Institute in Mumbai. He studied at the School of Architecture, Ahmedabad (CEPT), and graduated with a master’s degree with distinction in Urban Design from Harvard University. He has taught at the University of Michigan (2003–2007) and at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at MIT (2007–2010). From 2010 to 2015, he chaired the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
WHEN: Tuesday, 31 July 2018
TIME: 16:00 to 17:30
VENUE: Baxter Theatre, Main Road, Cape Town
RSVP: Space is limited. Please send an email to africancentreforcities.rsvp@gmail.com to secure your seat.

Urban Humanities Seminar Series 2018
2018-08-02 01:00 - 2018-11-15 16:30 | Environmental and Geographical Science Building, South Lane, Upper Campus, UCT, Cape Town, South Africa
Academic Seminars (15:00 – 16:30)
7 August
High Stakes, High Hopes: Creating Collaborative Urban Theory – Prof Sophie Oldfield
16 August
Inclusive Cultural Governance: Integrating artistic and cultural practices into national urban frameworks – Avril Joffe with respondent Zayd Minty
30 August
in search of thick mapping: listening to Cape Town’s cities – Dr Sabina Favaro
18 September
Vital Geopolitics – Gerry Kearns
20 September
The invention of the ‘Sink Estate’: Consequential Categorization and the UK Housing Crisis – Dr Tom Slater
18 October
Storytelling as method: migration, gender and inclusion in Durban – Dr Kira Erwin
1 November:
Contextualising strategies to enable LGBT rights in Africa: legitimacies, spatial inequalities and socio-spatial relationships – Dr Andy Tucker
15 November
Representing urban life in Africa and its diasporas – Dr Shari Daya and Dr Rike Sitas
Brown Bags (13:00-14:00)
23 August
‘Auditing’ vernacular Cape Town as a sonic city – Valmont Layne
6 September
pumflet: art, architecture and stuff – Ilze Wolff
27 September
Speculative Indigeneity – A (K)new Now – heeten bhagat
11 October
Conversations on cultural mapping and planning – Alicia Fortuin, Vaughn Sadie and Shamila Rahim
25 October
False Bay – Dr Hedley Twidle
