I met Neera over morning coffee in the
pleasant gardens of the Taj Mahal Hotel. She had been recommended to me by
Madhavi Desai as she had written a chapter in Madhavi's book on gender. Neera is
an architect who does mainly conservation and heritage work as well as teaching
at the Academy of Architecture. She outlined how the early training of architects
in India began when the British established the first course in 1922. The training
however was mainly focused around technical roles to provide staff for the
Public Works Department.
Neera has written about feminism and she
believes that most architecture courses in India produce graduates that are focused
on commercial success rather than working with informal communities. Many Indians,
she says, have an image of slums as being very dirty yet this is often not the
case. Certainly the slums I visited were very clean
inside the tiny dwellings.
Neera believes that men tend to see the
house as a tradable commodity that can be cashed in one day to move onto
something better. Women tend to see the house as a subsystem related to
cooking, sleeping etc. Within the professions in India the lawyers were the
first to become more feminist to help with dowry negotiations. Then the health care
sector and it has taken some time for architects to take on feminist viewpoints.
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