ROHAN SHIVKUMAR: CITIES NEED CULTURE / WDCD2011

Under the title Anarchytect, Indian architect, urban designer and educator Rohan Shivkumar blogs about cinema, literature and the changing face of Indian cities and villages. The blog reflects his cross-disciplinary view of architecture and the way art, literature and cinema should interact with the city.

Shivkumar is deputy director of the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture and Environmental Studies in Mumbai. His interests have been shaped by the dramatic changes in the physical landscape of the city, with rampant development wreaking havoc on communities and collective memory. He is interested in deciphering the patterns of these changes, the ideologies and their manifestations, and especially in the resistance posed by everyday life to the displacing tendencies of globalization. He feels it is imperative to reconstruct a relevant role for architects and designers in India by reinvigorating architecture as a cultural practice in the context of the city of Mumbai.

In his research and practice inside and outside the school he has taken part in many projects that deal with slum communities and housing, cultural production and its impact on spatial imagination, and heritage and conservation. He is currently project coordinator for Cinema City, an interdisciplinary venture exploring the relationship between cinema and the city of Mumbai.