Homegrown City

Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava co-founded urbz.net, an experimental action and research collective specialising in participatory planning and design. Its clients include community groups, municipal governments, international organisations, private foundations and corporations. urbz has worked with citizens, organisations and municipalities in Mumbai, Bogotá, São Paulo, Geneva and Seoul. urbz's work was exhibited at MoMA in New York, MAXXI in Rome, MAK in Vienna, Istanbul Design Biennial, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Sao Paulo Cultural Center, and Bhau Daji Lad City Museum in Mumbai. They have been published in journals such as The Hindu, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Art India, Domus (Milan), Oxford University Press and Strelka Press (Moscow). The Homegrown City is the first major publication that summarises what they have learned from more than a decade of practice and engagement with cities. Matias has studied Economics and Political Science at London School of Economics, Urban Planning at Columbia University in New York and Urban Information Systems at University of Tokyo. Rahul has studied Sociology and Anthropology at St. Xavier's College (Mumbai), JNU (Delhi) and University of Cambridge (UK).

The brilliance of The Homegrown City lies in its emphasis on a simple but rarely acknowledged truth: that the true experts of urban life are the inhabitants themselves-the local builders, artisans, and families who, through sheer ingenuity and collective agency, shape environments in ways that official planning often fails to imagine. Written by two researchers who have spent decades living and working in some of the world's poorest neighborhoods, the book presents a deeply humane approach to urbanism, suggesting many practical modalities for improving the quality of urban life, even in crowded megalopolises.