urban Village
charitable Trust
UVCT (Urban Village Charitable Trust) is a Research Repository and a Positive Mediation Platform in the field of cross-disciplinary dimensions of urban and rural built forms, landscapes, and economic and socio-cultural interactions. It is a not-for-profit for the recognition and encouragement of professionals, students and academic institutions towards researching, documenting and institutionalizing indigenous knowledge in villages for its application in rural design & planning.
How You Can Get Involved
Study | Document | Research | Realize | Share Cause
Volunteer Program
We many opportunities available for volunteering.
If you’d like to volunteer with UVCT, click here and fill out this form.
Once you have done that, we’ll be in touch with you soon.
Sponsor Program
Interested in sponsoring our work?
Just write to us at urbanvillagegroup@gmail.com and we’ll get back to you with sponsorship opportunities.
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Our Story
Villages were the old-urban. The pre-Industrial revolution urban or abaadi always existed in small walkable settlements / villages. In a century of motorization, the cities have grown. The size of the urban, is enormous today, but the settlement has been rendered un-walkable for humans. The social space has been destroyed by the boundaries that have come up around buildings, protecting institutions from speed and hence the society has disintegrated. Examples of the human tropical response to cities present in the form of Urban villages in our metros have been pushed into decay to the stage of necropolis by the development authorities who have neither given them any importance nor been able to handle settlement with the retro-planning yardstick. Urban villages have lost their balance by narrowing of roads and open space. They are becoming centers of crime, disease, poverty, drugs, and house all the ills of the society, along with providing economic and land space for the pitfalls of planning and the illegal. They are relentless centres for mass human devastation by natural disasters like fires and earthquakes. These are often enclosed by Lal-Doras (LD) put up by the British post mutiny. They have now become Extended Lal Doras (ELD) in independent India. No one has been able to open the LD or the ELD. We need high-level academic teams and polished dedicated architects for the cause.
UVCT is an academic repository to identify measures to clear urban plague.
Join hands with us.
uVcT Charter
Article 1
Our cities and towns are being led towards a nonproductive chaos due to the unaddressed growth of haphazard construction activity. Coupled with unprecedented population growth, it is raising questions on sustainability. Our focus at UVCT is on mitigating haphazard construction activity in villages, in rurban and in the peri-urban areas in proximity to urban. We shall aid ecology-centric development.
Article 2
On the opposite spectrum of urbanization, the primary sector of our economy and the support for the living-agriculture, allied economies, and the population engaged with it, is threatened. Symbiotic existence is at stake. Mindless construction is a threat to agriculture, vernacular built practices, and the people and lifestyle associated to the practice of vernacular.
Article 3
3a. Villages at the root of the settled civilized societies carry within themselves the germ of social-cultural and built typologies and heritage, which need continuation, protection and documentation.
3b. A major part of the workforce in our cities lives cramped in dense ‘urban villages’ that were once the aabadi areas of villages, whose fields were developed into cities over a period of time.
3c. There are complex and intricate socio- economic interdependencies of our cities’ functions to its rural countryside, as well as the process of industrialization.
3d. The rurban sprawl over the vast stretches of highways are destroying the ecological bridges that have been serving as a vital connection for the interconnectedness of green.
3e. Modern education and city-centric life must lend itself to the more humane and the humble who maintain close connections with a productive and basal life.
3f. we are continuously loosing agricultural lands, practices, and people who practiced and so the villages are losing the connection of agriculture. This is an irreparable loss to mankind.
Article 4
A better living in the urban villages so that instead of cordoning them, as the British did with Lal-Dora they become better habitable and more useful to their host city and also manage a hygiene and calamity safe co-existence to new developments will help organize growth.
Article 5
Many of these ‘urban villages’ have been declared as special areas or heritage areas, but guidelines based intervention has not yielded the desired outcome.
Article 6
Reworking economic approaches, recognition of the informal markets, enhancing quality of life and sustainable growth regulations will be constructive in establishing ‘urban villages’, ‘villages’, ‘rurban’ and ‘aabadi’ as an important typology of urban.
uVcT Oath
Life, in a correct balance with the environment shows a way to a more responsible, responsive and awakened living.
With a promise to stand by the cause of humanity, with deep compassion for the collective-common-life;
To all humans who have worn the emblem of life from birth to death and are a forever traveller of time;
To those who have withstood ignorance of wars for centuries and have in successions shown an improvement in the collective knowledge of our species;
To the farmer, the villager, the mason, the practitioners of small trades and handicrafts, to the commoner who needs a handholding on the Path;
To co-existent species of plants animals, known and unknown to us and to those who co-inhabit the earth with the correct balance
I shall lend my energy and my presence as an architect, a planner, a sociologist, an economist, and a fellow traveller.
My profession and education, while as a means of my dreams are also in the service of humankind.
Founding Members
UVCT was formed under the guidance of Emeritus Academic –Dr S M Akhtar and Emeritus Academic – Prof Rajat Ray by Professor Anand Khatri with the support of Dr. Anurag Verma, Dr Binu Tom , Dr Manish Chalana, Ar Raghvendra Bisen, Dr Vishakha Kawathekar, Dr Sonal Mittal, Dr Vaishali Prasad Latkar, Dr Tarush Chandra, Dr. Nisar Khan, Dr Gauri Kotnis Shiurkar, Prof. Divay Gupta, and Dr. Manju Baisoya Pundir as founder academics.
Dr Jay Mittal joined in 2020. Ar Atul Gupta, Ar. Mohnish Garga and Dr Harish Tripathi joined in 2021 as eminent academics and advisors.
Academic Alliances
News & Updates
Knowledge partner for AFM 2021 along with Jamia Millia Islamia
AFM 2021AFM 2021 is the 8th seminar on Architecture for masses, conducted through online platform from 17th to 19th March 2021. It's been organized by Faculty of Architecture and Ekistics, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Visit the AFM 2021 Page.
Get in Touch. Get Involved.
Urban Village Charitable Trust
Near Green Beauty Farms,
Village Nangli Nangla,
Greater Noida.
Call Us:
+91 98101 15129
+91 98685 67194
+91 99903 81962