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HUMANIZING PLANNING
REMEMBERING E.F.N. RIBEIRO
A.G.K. Menon
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| E.F.N. Ribeiro, eminent architect and planner, played a significant role in bringing the values of humane and inclusive development into government planning policies. Over a career spanning many decades, he served in several key decision-making institutions where policies shaping the growth and character of Indian cities were formulated. |
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I knew Edgar Ribeiro for almost four decades and interacted with him both professionally and as a friend, to discuss anything on my mind. This relationship inflected the course of my professional narrative in many ways, but here I will highlight only three that illuminate the kind of individual and professional he was.
I first met him in the early 1980s, along with M.N. Ashish Ganju, when he was the Commissioner of Planning in the Delhi Development Authority (DDA), engaged in drafting the second iteration of the Master Plan of Delhi, the MPD-2001. Along with Ganju and other colleagues, we had a few years earlier formed GREHA, a small informal research group to critically engage, suo moto, with the issues of the built environment.
In due course, we found that our interests overlapped with the objectives of the white papers that the DDA was drafting to critically evaluate the implementation of the original MPD-1961, and so we brashly decided to reach out to Ribeiro to share our ideas. Not only was Ribeiro willing to listen, but he also encouraged our dialogue by inviting us to workshops and commissioning papers on various topics. That serendipitous experience forged a bond between us that endured and evolved during the following decades.
Therefore, when GREHA embarked on its project to establish a new school of architecture in New Delhi in 1990, the TVB School of Habitat Studies (TVBSHS), to put into practice what we had learnt from our collective research and critical analysis of post-colonial architectural education in India, Ribeiro was among the innovative professional thinkers we consulted. He understood why it was necessary to introduce interdisciplinarity in the curriculum and pedagogy of architectural education to reform the dominant ideology of teaching architecture as a sovereign discipline. His inputs contributed to developing the innovative strategies we put in place to familiarise our undergraduate architecture students with the complex ground realities of the local contexts within which they were expected to learn and thereafter practice. |
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