Aranya Housing Case Study: Master Plan and Site and Services (B V Doshi)

Aranya is a sites-and-services township about 6 km from Indore, planned by B V Doshi and the Vastu-Shilpa Foundation for the Indore Development Authority in the early 1980s and completed around 1988 to 1989. Instead of handing over finished flats, it sold serviced plots, some with a plinth, a toilet core or one room, and left families to build the rest. This case study covers the brief, the master plan, plot sizes by income group, the section and services, materials, what happened after the 1995 Aga Khan Award, and what Indian designers can take from it.

If you are documenting Aranya for a studio or thesis, our field checklist for architecture case studies sets out what to record on site.

The brief: housing Indore's poor without building their houses

In 1981 Indore had 827,000 people and was growing at 4% a year, and the World Bank's 1983 Staff Appraisal Report found that IDA and Housing Board schemes had fallen far short of need, pushing people into 82 unserviced slums. Architecture in Development puts the number of families homeless or in illegal settlements in the early 1980s at about 51,000.

The answer the World Bank backed across Madhya Pradesh was sites and services: give low-income families land with water, drainage, sewers, paving and light, plus a loan, and let them build. The appraisal set the policy plainly:

• about 80% of plots affordable to households below the 50th income percentile
• land priced differently by plot type and access, with MIG and HIG plots sold at market prices
• 30-year renewable leases for allottees
• less house construction by government agencies

IDA commissioned the Indore site from the Vastushilpa Foundation, which Doshi set up in 1978 for research on settlements for the poor, rather than through his design office, according to Vikram Bhatt of McGill writing for the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). Rahul Srivastava of urbz also describes the scheme as World Bank backed.

Aranya housing location and site

The site lies about 6 km from Indore on the Malwa plateau. The appraisal planned to connect it to the city's water supply and sewers, which other sites in the programme did not get. Two facts shaped the design:

• The ground. Architecture in Development notes black cotton soil, which swells when wet and shrinks as it dries. Our building materials guide for Indore, Bhopal and Madhya Pradesh explains why that soil changes foundations.
• The slope. The architect's record, as published by Architexturez, says topography decided the roads and service networks, to use gravity flow and keep cut and fill low.

Concept and design ideas

The architect's record lists six aims for the plan:

• Vitality: support the community's economic hopes.
• Imageability: give identity and a sense of belonging.
• Equity: a balanced community with decent surroundings for all.
• Efficiency: make the most of land, materials and people.
• Flexibility: absorb growth and change easily.
• Feasibility: work within the legal, financial and organisational limits.

The architect's drawings include studies of existing squatter settlements in Indore. The record compares the clusters to the mohallas of traditional towns, and its drawings show the plan going through stages:

1. a layout prepared by IDA
2. a first proposal with distributed streets
3. a version corrected for climate and performance

Aranya housing master plan and site plan

The Aga Khan Award's project page gives the master plan in a few lines:

• A central spine holds the business district.
• Six sectors lie east and west of it, each for 7,000 to 12,000 people.
• Linear parks cut diagonally across each sector.
• Income mix: the poorest families are placed in the middle of each sector and the better off along sector edges and the spine.

The architect's record describes the income groups as concentric rings of plots.

Street hierarchy and clusters

• Vehicles stay out. Cars and trucks keep to the outer roads, which the architect's drawings label 4.5 m wide, and pedestrians use paths and open spaces inside the sectors.
• Lanes for small plots. Across the programme, the appraisal planned most small plots to front 3 m and 4.5 m pedestrian lanes, with larger plots on roads of 6 m to 12 m right of way.
• Streets that bend. Streets change width, bend and widen. Formal shops line the main roads; informal ones grow along the lanes.
• Clusters of ten. Ten houses, each with a courtyard at the back, form a cluster that opens onto a street (Aga Khan Award).
• Layers of open space. Architecture in Development describes courtyards shared by three or four families, a green space for each sector and a central playing field.

These are MOA's schematic readings. To see the architect's master plan, cluster plans and sequence drawings, open the Architexturez listing or the Aga Khan Award's documentation on Archnet.

Plots and income groups: who got what

The appraisal's tables for the Indore site are the most exact public record of the plan:

• 86.25 ha and 6,543 plots, including 42 for multi-storey flats
• 4,262 EWS plots, 1,095 for the low income group (LIG), 891 for the middle income group (MIG) and 295 for the high income group (HIG) and small business
• about ₹6 crore estimated for the Indore site (₹601.50 lakh, March 1983 prices)

Bhatt's CCA article gives the same headline: 65% of 6,500 plots reserved for the EWS, on plots of 35 m², for households earning about US$35 a month.

Table IV.1 of the appraisal sets out eight plot types:

• EWS 1 to 3: 35.32 m² each for household incomes of ₹250 to ₹350 a month, with land at ₹25 per m². They differ only in the core house that came with the plot, costing ₹1,600, ₹4,665 or ₹5,998.
• LIG 1 to 3: 44.65 m² to 93.03 m², with land at ₹72 to ₹95 per m².
• MIG 1 and 2: 139.54 m² and 223.26 m², with land at ₹125 and ₹130 per m².

Before any building loan, monthly payments came to about 7% to 19% of household income, over 20 years at 12% interest. One caution for anyone quoting these figures: the per-type counts in Table IV.1 add up to slightly more than Table II.2's totals in the same report, so quote the totals from Table II.2.

The core options for the poorest

The Aga Khan Award says most income groups bought only a plot, while the poorest could also get a concrete plinth, a service core and a room. The appraisal describes the programme's EWS cores in three options:

1. a toilet with a water point
2. option 1 plus a roofed skeleton room of about 10 m² on brick columns
3. option 2 with brick walls

At Indore the toilets were to be flush latrines on the sewer.

The demonstration houses

Doshi designed 80 demonstration houses, ranging from one-room shelters to fairly spacious houses (Aga Khan Award). The architect's drawings on Architexturez present them as a kit of elements with variations, including choices in the street-facing parts of each house.

Aranya housing section and structure

Every owner built differently, so there is no single section. The principle can be drawn: the project fixed the ground, plinth and services, and owners built up from there.

• Foundations. On the black cotton soil, small-diameter shallow piles of poured concrete were tied together at plinth level by concrete beams. Load-bearing masonry walls sit on the beams (Architecture in Development).
• The service slot. The architect's record describes an open slot around the service core that serves twice as many toilets per manhole and halves pipe lengths. It also breaks up the built mass and gives children a place to play.
• Room to grow upwards. Srivastava describes one plot whose 32 by 12 ft base had grown to a house of about 900 sq ft reaching a third floor.

Aranya low cost housing: materials and construction

Brick, stone and concrete were available locally, but owners were free to use any material for building and decoration (Aga Khan Award). Paving was graded too: Architecture in Development says EWS streets and squares were paved in stone, and the peripheral roads in asphalt for heavy traffic.

McGill's Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG), which studied the township after occupation, found that people built in stages as their money and materials allowed. Early work was in cheap materials; later work moved to brick and reinforced concrete.

Light, climate and services

• Orientation. Houses are north-south facing row houses, so their walls take the least sun (architect's record). Architecture in Development adds that north and south openings give daylight and cross-ventilation.
• Shade. Courtyards, cul-de-sacs and squares are shaded by the buildings around them and by trees.
• Water and power. Water and electricity run throughout. Internal streets and squares are paved.
• Sewage. The sources differ. The Aga Khan Award page describes septic tanks for each group of twenty houses. The 1983 appraisal planned flush latrines on a city sewer, starting with a stabilisation pond. We could not confirm what was finally built.

Reception: the Aga Khan Award and Aranya today

Aranya won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in the 1993 to 1995 cycle. The jury called it "an innovative sites-and-services project", noting its effort to bring together families from poor to modest incomes. When Doshi won the Pritzker Prize in 2018, the jury cited Aranya (dated 1989) as one of the projects that kept his pledge to house the poorest.

How it grew

Accounts of today's population differ:

• The Pritzker announcement and Bhatt (2018) say over 80,000 people live there, against a projection of 60,000 to 70,000.
• A Thomson Reuters Foundation report of 2017, republished by Eco-Business, counted about 35,000 when Doshi returned that spring. It says he was given 4,000 plots in 1988, against the 6,500 in other sources.

The same report describes what owners built:

• two- and three-storey houses
• most families with at least two flats, one to live in and one to let
• workshops, shops and side rooms added over time

Doshi's verdict on the residents, quoted there: "They invented better than the architects could have."

Problems

• Who lives there. Srivastava (urbz, 2011) wrote that many of Doshi's original ideas did not survive implementation. Some lottery allottees sold their plots, investors bought others without building, and he says the low-income population had become a minority.
• The town centre. Srivastava also says the centre was left undeveloped when money ran short, which held back the neighbourhood around it.
• Open spaces. The McGill study found small open spaces well used for temples, festivals, drying clothes and trees, while many large ones were left empty and some filled with waste.
• The programme as a whole. The World Bank's 1992 completion report covers all ten cities, not Aranya alone. It found only about a third of serviced plots and core houses occupied when the loan closed. It also called the shelter loan component a failure and said the agencies were better at building than at selling plots or managing loans.

What designers in India can take from Aranya

These are MOA's reading, not claims from the sources.

1. Spend public money on what owners cannot easily add later. Land, plinth, foundations on difficult soil, the sewer and the street layout are hard to fix once a town is built. Rooms are not. Aranya put the budget where change is costly and left the rest to families.
2. Design the service network as hard as the houses. Back-to-back cores on a shared slot halved pipe runs on the architect's own account. In any affordable layout, plan plumbing and drainage as clusters before fixing the plots.
3. Mixing incomes needs allocation rules, not only a plan. Graded land prices and mixed sectors were the plan. Later accounts suggest lotteries, resale and investors shifted who lived there. If you design mixed-income housing, ask early how plots are allocated and whether resale is controlled.
4. Size open space for the people who will look after it. Small cluster spaces were used; large ones were often neglected. Give each open space a clear owner group and a use.

Housing like this suits a thesis. Our B.Arch thesis topics by typology lists mass and incremental housing topics to build on.

Visiting Aranya

Aranya is a neighbourhood of private homes, and no official body publishes visiting arrangements. If you go, keep to streets and public open spaces and ask before photographing people or homes. For drawings, start with the Aga Khan Award, Archnet and the MCHG material at the CCA.

Looking for an architect for housing or a township project? Find an architect on MOA.

FAQ

Who designed Aranya housing in Indore?

The Vastu-Shilpa (Vastushilpa) Foundation with Balkrishna V. Doshi, for the Indore Development Authority. Doshi designed the 80 demonstration houses.

When was Aranya housing built?

The master plan dates from 1983 according to the Aga Khan Award, or 1981 in the CCA's archive record. Sources give completion as 1988 (CCA, McGill) or 1989 (Aga Khan Award, Pritzker Prize). Owners have kept building ever since.

What is the site area of Aranya housing?

85 ha net planning area per the Aga Khan Award; the World Bank's 1983 appraisal gives the site as 86.25 ha, with 6,543 planned plots.

What are the plot sizes at Aranya?

In the 1983 appraisal, EWS plots averaged 35.32 m², LIG plots 44.65 m² to 93.03 m², and MIG plots 139.54 m² and 223.26 m². About 65% of the plots were for the Economically Weaker Section.

Why is Aranya called incremental housing?

Because families started with a serviced plot, sometimes with a plinth, toilet core or one room, and extended their houses over the years as their money allowed.

Sources

• Aga Khan Development Network, Aga Khan Award for Architecture: Aranya Community Housing, project page and jury citation, 1993 to 1995 cycle (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Archnet: Aranya Community Housing, site record with Aga Khan Award documents, including the 1995 On-site Review Report (catalogue record read via the Internet Archive; accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• World Bank: Staff Appraisal Report 4359-IN, India: Madhya Pradesh Urban Development Project, 8 June 1983, paras 2.08 to 2.14 and 4.08 to 4.09, Tables II.2, II.3 and IV.1, Annex 1 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• World Bank: Project Completion Report 11447, India: Madhya Pradesh Urban Development Project (Loan 2329-IN), 21 December 1992 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Architexturez: Demonstration houses and masterplan for Aranya Community, from the Architect's Record submitted to the Aga Khan Award, 1995 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Canadian Centre for Architecture, Vikram Bhatt: Balkrishna Doshi's Aranya, May 2018 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Canadian Centre for Architecture: Aranya township post occupancy study, Minimum Cost Housing Group fonds (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• McGill University, Minimum Cost Housing Group: Post-occupancy study of Aranya Housing Project (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Architecture in Development, Lohita Turlapati: Aranya Housing Project, updated 1 June 2014 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• urbz, Rahul Srivastava: Aranya: A story of incremental development, 8 August 2011 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• Eco-Business, republished from the Thomson Reuters Foundation: Building for India's poor: plant a seed to grow a forest, 28 August 2017 (accessed 3 Nov 2026)
• The Pritzker Architecture Prize: Balkrishna Doshi, 2018 Laureate (accessed 3 Nov 2026)