Vinayak Bharne is an urban designer and city planner based in Los Angeles, USA. He is Principal and Director of Design of the award-winning practice Moule & Polyzoides, a faculty of urbanism at the University of Southern California, and Executive Editor of the India-Netherlands-based urbanism journal, My Liveable City. His books include The Emerging Asian City, and the forthcoming Routledge Companion on Global Heritage Conservation. Shyam Khandekar is an urban designer, city planner and architect with four decades of design experience in Europe and India. He was the founder and director of the award-winning Dutch design practice Khandekar Urban Design and Landscape, that continued under the name BDP.Khandekar. From 2008-2012 he served as Company Director of the major international design practice BDP, headquartered in London. He is Co-Founder and Director of the Knowledge Platform, My Liveable City, and Editorial Director of its urbanism magazine.

"This volume illustrates cutting-edge progressive efforts aimed at understanding what works and why." --Sanjeev Vidyarthi, Director, City Design Program, University of Illinois at Chicago "This volume offers a deeply informative range of insights and experiences on housing and urbanism." --Jagan Shah, Director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs, India "This volume is a comprehensive collection of essays revolving around two of the most important challenges in the contemporary city: housing affordability and socio-political inclusiveness. The editors and authors of this extraordinary assemblage do not stop their scholarly work just there; the text and its beautiful illustrations provide the clarity of content that a present-day reader requires for a preliminary understanding of housing design principles, informal and formal cities, mobility and infrastructure, socio-economic and gender segregation, public participation, community led-development, new technologies, climate resiliency, urban policies, and the future of urban form and dwelling opportunities in a variety of geographic and political conditions around the world." --Jaime Correa, Associate Professor in Urban Design Practice, University of Miami, USA "As a practitioner working with residents of informal settlements where lack of housing and basic service delivery remains formidable hurdles to accessing opportunities for betterment of life, this multi-layered book has helped generate significant strategic thinking." --Anita Patil-Deshmukh, Executive Director, PUKAR, India "This book is a must-read for architects, planners, and policy makers, who should use their powers of imagination to create social added value." --Floris Alkemade, Chief Government Architect of The Netherlands