ABSTRACT
A foretaste of the kinds of problems confronting urban planners is provided in a report published by the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights (ACHR). As the global economic network strengthens, and the Indian economy becomes more integrated with it, the ACHR report identifies the very real prospects of increasing fragmentation of cities creating segregated zones of rich and poor. In effect, the dialectic process of resolving local urban issues was replaced by unquestioningly using foreign models of planning. As the profession of town planning was established during the colonial period, and town planners saw the Indian city as outsiders looking into a culturally alien situation. They viewed what existed in negative terms and considered the benchmark from England in positive terms and as the normative model. With the establishment of the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage in 1984, there was a focused interest in the conservation of our built heritage.
