Belapur Incremental Housing Case Study: Plan and Concept (Charles Correa)

Belapur Incremental Housing, often called Artists' Village, is a low-rise, mixed-income housing scheme in Navi Mumbai designed by Charles Correa for CIDCO and built between 1983 and 1986. It puts about 500 people on every hectare without a single tall building: each family gets its own small plot, every house stands free so it can grow, and the houses gather in clusters around a ladder of shared courts. Below: the brief, the site plan, the house principle, construction, what happened as families extended, and lessons for designers in India today.

The brief: CIDCO, New Bombay and a housing experiment

Belapur grew out of a much larger idea. In the early 1960s Correa and two colleagues proposed developing land across the harbour from Bombay to take pressure off the crowded peninsula. That proposal became Navi Mumbai, planned for 2 million people, as Correa explained in an interview with Rohan Varma in DASH, the Delft housing journal (issue 12/13). The Praemium Imperiale biography dates the alternative master plan to 1964 and 1965, names Shirish Patel among his co-authors, and records Correa as Chief Architect to CIDCO from 1971 to 1974.

The housing came a decade later. Correa described it to DASH as "an experiment right next to the city centre, built in the 1980s", with a clear brief:

• Mix incomes on one site. House a very wide range of income groups, from the lowest up to the upper-middle.
• Reach high density while staying low. Hit an overall density of 500 persons per hectare, counting social amenities.
• Keep the money local. Make houses simple enough for local masons and carpenters, so the spending reaches what Correa called the bazaar sector of the economy, where new migrants work.

The Charles Correa Foundation's project page describes the residents as covering "almost the entire social spectrum", from squatter families to upper-income households.

The Foundation's 2018 exhibition on Correa's housing placed Belapur's courtyard clusters after the Tube House in his thinking. Down To Earth calls the Tube House (Ahmedabad, 1961 to 1962) a prototype for low-income housing.

Site and context

The site is 6 ha of land about 2 km from the city centre of New Bombay (Correa Foundation). Correa's own phrase in the DASH interview is "right next to the city centre". Two conditions shaped the plan:

• Climate. A caption in the interview stresses the hot, humid climate of Bombay. Cross-ventilation was a reason to keep houses apart.
• The new city's economy. Navi Mumbai was being built for migrants arriving in the region, so the houses had to be cheap to build and easy to add to.

Do not confuse it with the other CIDCO housing at Belapur. In 1988 CIDCO invited Raj Rewal to design over 1,000 low-cost units on a hillside near the Central Business District, a separate project documented by Rohan Varma in the same DASH issue.

Belapur housing concept: housing is the space between the houses

Correa's starting point, in the DASH interview, is that housing "is much more than just brick and mortar". It is also the open-to-sky spaces between buildings, which in a warm climate become part of daily life. He describes successful housing as a continuum of spaces running from the most private to the semi-private to the public, and argues that this continuum is what makes a community. Slums, chawls and tenements are communities, he says; tall buildings "do not generate community", only anonymity.

So at Belapur the design effort went into the site plan, not the houses. Asked whether the real problem was the site planning, Correa answered "Yes, absolutely", adding that "the house plans were merely indicative".

The same interview closes with his list of principles for housing in cities of the developing world:

• incrementality
• equity
• malleability
• open-to-sky space
• disaggregation
• pluralism
• participation
• income generation

Four of them, incrementality, equity, malleability and open-to-sky space, can be read directly in Belapur's plan.

Belapur housing site plan: a hierarchy of courts

Usually, low-rise high-density housing takes the form of row houses along monotonous linear corridors, Correa's captions note. Belapur replaces the corridor with a nested set of courts. Correa's figure captions in DASH and the Foundation's page set out the steps:

1. The cluster. Seven houses around a shared courtyard of 8 x 8 m.
2. The module. Three clusters combine into a module of 21 houses around an open space of 12 x 12 m.
3. The next scale. Three modules interlock to define a larger community space of approximately 20 x 20 m.
4. The neighbourhood. The hierarchy continues up to the largest spaces, where primary schools and similar facilities sit.

Across the 6 ha site this houses 600 families, with kindergartens, elementary schools, play fields and health clinics included in the density figure. Correa compared the pattern to the traditional habitat found across India, where family and community spaces form one continuum.

A general diagram in the same interview, Correa's "hierarchy of spaces", names four steps: courtyard, doorstep, water tap and community centre. Belapur's nested courts are that sequence at site scale.

Equity in plot sizes

The plots vary only from 45 to 70 m², although the range of incomes is large, a ratio of 1:10 in Correa's caption. The Foundation's page presents this as deliberate: to keep the principle of equity, "the sites themselves vary in size only marginally". Richer and poorer families share the same courts and live on plots that look much alike.

Belapur housing plan and section: why every house stands alone

The key move at house scale is that no two houses touch. Each house sits on its own piece of land and shares no party wall with its neighbours (Correa Foundation). Correa's caption gives three reasons:

• Incremental growth. Every house can be extended unilaterally, by one family acting alone.
• Air. Free-standing houses get cross-ventilation, which the caption calls essential in Bombay's hot, humid climate.
• Fewer disputes. With no shared walls or roofs, neighbours need far less joint work, and have fewer quarrels, over things like roof repairs.

Within the plot, each family also has open-to-sky space, such as kitchen yards and terraces, to add to the covered area.

On height, Correa told DASH that "we intentionally restricted the Belapur project to a ground floor and two upper storeys", and that the same principles could work in other typologies. His point was about thresholds. Doubling housing density saves only about 16 per cent of a city's land, he argued, because housing takes only about a third of a city's area. Pushing density past an optimum stops paying off.

The DASH article reproduces Correa's own section across a basic module and his cluster plans. Use those for your sheets rather than redrawn versions from slide decks.

Materials and construction

The published descriptions say more about who builds than about what with. The houses' form and plans are "very simple", the Foundation says, so that traditional masons and craftsmen can build and extend them. Correa added in DASH that the money then does not go to commercial banks or big-city contractors but into the bazaar sector, "where the migrants are".

Correa also called the houses "quite malleable", so that in time occupants can add overlays of colours and symbols and make them their own.

Neither the Foundation's page nor the interview specifies wall or roof materials, unit costs or house types per income group. Student case studies online give brick walls and tiled roofs and quote costs, but we could not trace those details to a primary source. Check the archive (see Visiting below) before putting materials or costs on a thesis sheet. For what suits the region today, see our guide to building materials for Mumbai and Thane.

Light, climate and services

Belapur's climate strategy is in the plan rather than in any device:

• Separation. Gaps between houses let air pass on more than one side.
• Outdoor rooms. Courts and yards give shade and space to cook, wash and sit outside, which in Correa's view a warm climate makes "inhabitable".
• Services as places. Correa's hierarchy of spaces puts the water tap between the doorstep and the community centre: a shared service treated as a place to meet.

Cars barely figured. In 2015 a resident told Sahapedia that cars do not reach his cluster; at most a two-wheeler does, and people pass through the common court to reach their homes.

Reception: what happened as families extended

The best dated account we found is an interview recorded at Artists' Village in September 2015 by Anurag Mazumdar for Sahapedia. The resident, Vishwas Gupta, has owned his house since the 1987 allotment (in his father's name, an artist) and moved in permanently in 2000 after redeveloping it. His observations, as an architect and resident:

• Houses changed, layout held. "Most of the houses in Artists' Village have changed, but the layout which Charles Correa planned still remains." In many clusters the court among seven houses is still used for tea with neighbours and small get-togethers.
• Edges crept out. Some residents fenced space outside with grilles and used it for storage.
• Too small for work. A one-room-and-kitchen unit is too small for an artist or artisan who needs a workroom, he said.
• No growth rules. Correa gave no guidelines for how increments should happen. Some neighbours have gone to court over disagreements, and the Navi Mumbai Municipal Corporation's development rules suit row housing, not cluster housing.
• Greener than expected. Odd leftover spaces that cannot be walked through get planted and kept by neighbours.
• Access and resale. Houses without a road in front are harder to sell, in his view.

Correa's own captions in DASH show houses "as they originally were" beside photographs of how "some have grown and changed with the families needs", and describe today's Belapur as "a quiet, pedestrian friendly neighbourhood".

The project kept its place in teaching and research. The RIBA's 2013 Correa exhibition in London showed it, according to Dezeen. A 2013 eCAADe conference paper by Leticia Teixeira Mendes, José Nuno Beirão, José Pinto Duarte and Gabriela Celani used shape grammars to analyse it as a bottom-up social housing system.

What designers in India can take from Belapur

These are our reading, not claims from the sources.

1. Spend design effort on the open space, not the house type. Correa treated the houses as indicative and drew the courts with care. On a group housing or plotted layout, draw the hierarchy first: who shares which space, how many households per court, where the tap, the bench and the tree go.
2. If you promise growth, write the rules for it. Belapur's free-standing houses made growth possible; the missing guidelines made it contentious. A one-page growth code is enough: maximum height, which side may be built over, setbacks to keep for light, where water drains. Agree it with the local authority, since standard setback, FAR and height byelaws were not written for clusters.
3. Small plots can be generous if open space is shared well. Plots of 45 to 70 m² are tiny by private-house standards. Belapur makes them liveable with yards, terraces and courts. Our guide to what you can build on a small Indian plot covers the practical side.
4. Decide where vehicles stop. In the 2015 resident's account, car-free courts are what keep Belapur's clusters sociable, and also what puts some buyers off. Plan two-wheeler and car parking at the edge of each module from day one, so courts are not lost to parking later.

If you are documenting Belapur for a studio or thesis, our field checklist for an architecture case study covers measured sketches, photographs and interviews with residents.

Visiting Belapur housing and finding the drawings

Artists' Village is a neighbourhood of private homes, not a museum, and we found no official visitor programme. You can walk the public lanes, but courts are shared front yards: ask before entering one, and ask before photographing people or the inside of houses. Talking to residents, as Sahapedia did, is often the best part of a site visit.

Where to see Correa's own material:

• DASH. The open-access interview reproduces his cluster plans, module section and photographs of the houses before and after families extended them.
• The Charles Correa Foundation. It runs the Correa Archives; start from its Belapur page.
• The RIBA. Correa gave the RIBA his archive of over 6,000 drawings (Dezeen, 2013).

Looking for an architect who designs low-rise housing or plotted layouts? Find an architect on MOA.

FAQ

Who designed Belapur housing?

Charles Correa, for CIDCO, the agency that built Navi Mumbai. Correa had earlier co-proposed New Bombay and served as Chief Architect to CIDCO from 1971 to 1974.

When was Belapur incremental housing built?

It was designed in 1983 and built between 1983 and 1986, according to the Charles Correa Foundation. One resident's house was allotted in 1987.

What is incremental housing in Belapur?

Each family has a free-standing house on its own plot of 45 to 70 m², with no shared walls, so it can extend its home over time without its neighbours. The houses are grouped in clusters of seven around 8 x 8 m courts.

What is the density of Belapur housing?

About 500 persons per hectare, including schools and open spaces: about 600 families on a 6 ha site, in low-rise houses.

Is Belapur housing the same as Raj Rewal's CIDCO housing?

No. Raj Rewal's CIDCO low-cost housing, commissioned in 1988, is a separate project of over 1,000 units on a hillside near the Belapur Central Business District.

Sources

• Charles Correa Foundation: Incremental Housing, Belapur, Navi Mumbai 1983-86 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Charles Correa Foundation: Building on Ideas: Charles Correa's built and unbuilt housing projects, 19 April 2018 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• DASH, Delft Architectural Studies on Housing, Rohan Varma: Affordable Cities: Interview with Charles Correa, issue 12/13 (dated 2016, published online 2018), pages 88 to 101, text and figure captions 11 to 21 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• DASH, Delft Architectural Studies on Housing, Rohan Varma: CIDCO Housing, Navi Mumbai: Raj Rewal, issue 12/13, pages 258 to 269 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Sahapedia, Anurag Mazumdar: The Making of Artists Village, interview with Vishwas Gupta recorded September 2015 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Praemium Imperiale: Laureate Charles Correa (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Down To Earth, Avikal Somvanshi: Remembering Charles Correa, one of the pioneers of sustainable architecture, 19 June 2015 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Dezeen, Emilie Chalcraft: David Adjaye to design Charles Correa exhibition at RIBA, 23 March 2013 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Penn State, research record: A Bottom-Up Social Housing System Described with Shape Grammars: the case of Belapur low-income housing development, eCAADe 2013 proceedings, pages 705 to 714 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)