Inappropriately appropriated or innovatively indigenized?: Neighborhood unit concept in post-independence India

Abstract

This article traces the long-term development of the neighborhood unit concept in Indian planning practice and literature. By concentrating on the role and actions of post-independence planners, this article also explains the steps through which they reconciled neighborhood unit's perceived foreignness with its imagined potential for national development. It concludes that while planners assimilated the concept in planning practice rather successfully, their efforts eventually mattered little because a host of urban actors gradually transformed the built neighborhoods to the extent that they represent a distinct form of urbanism today. © 2010 The Author(s).