Most conversations about housing in India begin with a finished product: a flat of a given carpet area, handed over with doors, tiles and a kitchen platform, at a price a family either can or cannot afford. For the families who most need housing, that model has a hard limit. A finished unit has to be paid for at once, it is the same for every household, and it rarely leaves room for the shop, the extra room for a married son or the rental floor that pays the loan. When the product does not fit, families either stay where they are or alter the building in ways it was never designed to take.
Aranya, the township planned in Indore in the 1980s by Balkrishna Doshi's practice Vastu-Shilpa for the Indore Development Authority, started from a different question: what is the least a public agency must provide so that families can build good homes themselves? The answer — a serviced plot, a basic service core, well-designed streets and a framework of rules — turned housing from a product into a process. Doshi received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2018, and Aranya is one of the works most often cited when his contribution to ordinary people's lives is discussed.
This article explains how Aranya was organised, why the sites-and-services idea behind it matters, what the street and cluster planning achieved, and how the same thinking applies today — to government schemes, to row-house developers and to any family building on its own plot in Surat, Indore or anywhere else. Where precise figures for the project are not certain, the article describes the principle rather than inventing numbers. Plans and dimensions in the figures are illustrative, drawn to show the ideas, not survey drawings of Aranya.
Before Aranya: how the housing problem was framed
By the 1970s, Indian cities were growing faster than any agency could build finished houses. Public housing boards produced blocks of small, identical flats, but the numbers were far below demand and the units were often too expensive for the poorest families they were meant for. Informal settlements filled the gap. They lacked water, drainage and secure tenure, but they had something the public blocks lacked: families built, extended and adapted their homes as their incomes and needs changed.
Internationally, thinkers and agencies were drawing the same conclusion. The architect John F.C. Turner, writing from his experience in Peru, argued that housing is best understood as an activity people carry out over time rather than a finished object delivered to them. International lenders, including the World Bank, promoted sites-and-services schemes in which the public sector supplied land, roads, water, drainage and power, and households built the houses. Results around the world were mixed: some schemes became thriving neighbourhoods, while others were placed far from jobs or left plots empty. The quality of the planning decided which way a scheme went.
Doshi came to this question with a long interest in how ordinary Indian towns work — the pols of Ahmedabad, where narrow lanes, otlas and shared chowks hold a community together, and the way a house in such a town grows upward and inward over generations. His practice had already designed housing for institutions and companies in the 1960s and 1970s, and had seen how residents altered and extended what was built for them. Aranya was the chance to design for that change from the start.
What Aranya was
Aranya was planned as a new township on open land on the edge of Indore, in Madhya Pradesh. The client was the Indore Development Authority, and the planning and design were carried out by Vastu-Shilpa under Doshi. The brief was to house a large population, with a strong focus on the economically weaker section, in a way that families could afford and that would mature into a real neighbourhood rather than a housing estate. The name Aranya means forest — a reference to the idea of a settlement that grows and fills in over time.
Three decisions defined the project. First, the scheme was organised as sites and services: families received a plot connected to roads, water supply, sewerage and electricity, rather than a completed house. Second, the poorest households received a basic service core on their plot — typically a plinth with a toilet and water connection — so the most expensive and technically demanding part of a home was already in place. Third, different income groups were planned together, with larger plots along the busier roads and smaller plots in the interior clusters, so that cross-subsidy, shared facilities and everyday mixing were built into the layout.
To show families what was possible, the project built a set of demonstration houses with a range of plans, facades and stages of growth: rooms added at the back, an upper floor added later, a shop at the front, a stair placed so that a floor could be rented independently. These houses were not prescriptions but examples. They showed how a house of brick, concrete and local materials could grow in steps without becoming a patchwork, and they set a visual language of openings, parapets and projections that later builders could follow.
| Aspect | Conventional public flats | Aranya approach (sites and services) | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|---|
| What the family receives | A finished unit | A serviced plot; for the poorest, a plinth with a service core | Lower entry cost; family spends as income allows |
| Who builds the house | The agency's contractor | The family, a local mason or a small builder | Local jobs; homes match each family's needs |
| Size and plan | Identical for every household | Grows from the core to a full house over years | Room for a shop, rental floor or extended family |
| Income groups | Usually one group per estate | Several groups planned together | Cross-subsidy and social mixing |
| Streets and open space | Leftover space between blocks | Designed hierarchy of roads, lanes and cluster courts | Streets become places for work, play and gathering |
| Role of the designer | Designs the building | Designs the framework, rules and examples | Quality without controlling every house |
| Main risk | Units unaffordable or unsuitable | Slow build-out; uneven quality if rules are weak | Needs good guidance and services that work |
Planning the township: spine, streets and clusters
The plan of Aranya is usually described as a hierarchy. A central spine runs through the township, carrying the main road, shops, community buildings and the larger plots whose owners could pay more. From the spine, smaller roads lead into sectors, and from those, narrow lanes and paths lead to clusters of plots grouped around shared open spaces. Movement slows as one goes in: buses and trucks on the spine, two-wheelers and carts in the sector roads, children and pedestrians in the lanes and courts.
This hierarchy is not just traffic engineering. Each level of street has a social life. The spine is a bazaar; the sector road is where a tea stall or a tailor opens a front room; the lane is shared by perhaps a dozen houses and works almost like a corridor of an extended family; the cluster court is where women dry grain, children play cricket and weddings put up a shamiana. Doshi drew these patterns from old Indian towns, where the street is a room and the otla in front of a house is a seat, a shop counter and a place to talk.
The plot layout also solved a practical problem. Plots were arranged so that the wet areas of neighbouring houses could share drainage runs, keeping sewer lines short and maintenance simple. Service lines ran in a predictable relationship to each plot, so a family adding a toilet or a kitchen on an upper floor could connect it without digging up a neighbour's land. Good incremental housing depends on exactly this kind of quiet infrastructure planning, which the family never sees but relies on for decades.
| Street level | Indicative width in Indian practice | Main users | Social role | Design lesson |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Spine or main road | ≈ 18–24 m | Buses, trucks, cars, bazaar traffic | Shops, community buildings, transport | Put the commercial plots and denser uses here |
| Sector or collector road | ≈ 9–12 m | Cars, two-wheelers, autos | Corner shops, small services | Allow ground-floor shops on corners |
| Access lane | ≈ 4.5–6 m | Two-wheelers, handcarts, emergency access | Extended-family street, otlas, play | Keep it narrow enough to feel owned |
| Cluster court | Varies with the cluster | Pedestrians, children | Festivals, drying, gatherings | Overlooked by front doors for safety |
| Rear service lane (where used) | ≈ 3–4.5 m | Service access, drains | Utility only | Group wet areas back to back along it |
The service core: starting a house with the hardest part
In most small houses the most expensive and least forgiving parts are the toilet, the bath, the water connection, the drainage and the foundation. A family with savings for one room will often build that room first and put the toilet wherever it fits, with a soak pit and a hose from a shared tap — choices that are very hard to undo. Aranya reversed this order for the poorest households. The plinth, the wet core and the connections to water and sewer came first, built properly by the scheme, and the family added rooms around them.
For anyone planning a small house in stages today, this remains the single most useful lesson. Build the foundation for the final number of floors, even if only one is built now. Place the wet areas — toilet, bath, kitchen sink — on one shared wall so that a vertical stack can serve every future floor. Put the staircase where it can later give independent access to an upper floor that may be rented. And leave starter bars or a clear structural grid so that columns can continue upward safely, with a structural engineer's design rather than guesswork.
The dimensions in Fig. 3 follow ordinary Indian practice rather than Aranya's own drawings. A WC compartment of about 1200 mm by 1800 mm comfortably exceeds the National Building Code's minimum of 1.1 m² for a water closet; a bath of a similar size exceeds the 1.8 m² minimum for a bathroom. Grouping both on one wall, close to the road-side sewer, keeps pipe runs short and slopes easy to achieve. A plinth about 450 mm above road level keeps monsoon water out — a detail many self-built houses forget, only to raise the floor later at great cost.
How a family builds: the incremental stages
Incremental housing works because families can match spending to income. A household with irregular earnings can afford a room this year, a kitchen in two years and an upper floor once a son starts working. The danger is that each stage is planned only for itself, and the final house becomes a cramped, dark and structurally doubtful accumulation of rooms. The demonstration houses at Aranya were meant to avoid this by showing a sequence in which each step left the next one possible.
The table below turns those stages into a budget for an illustrative 4.5 × 9 m plot in a tier-2 Gujarat city such as Surat. Construction costs use this blog's indicative October 2026 band for basic construction of about ₹1,800–2,200 per sq ft of built-up area; the service-core stage is priced as a lump sum because it is mostly plumbing, foundation and connection work. Land, approvals and connection charges by the local body are excluded. The point is not the exact figure but the order: each stage is affordable on its own, and none of them requires demolishing the last.
| Stage | What is built | Built-up added (approx.) | Indicative cost (October 2026) | Must be decided beforehand |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 — core | Foundation for final height, plinth, WC, bath, connections | ≈ 40 sq ft wet core | ≈ ₹2.5–4 lakh lump sum | Final number of floors; position of the wet stack |
| 1 — ground floor | One or two rooms, kitchen, front otla or shop | ≈ 350–400 sq ft | ≈ ₹6.3–8.8 lakh | Column grid; window positions; front use |
| 2 — first floor | Two rooms, second toilet on the same stack, stair | ≈ 400–430 sq ft | ≈ ₹7.2–9.5 lakh | Stair position for independent access |
| 3 — second floor | Rental unit or family floor, terrace | ≈ 400–430 sq ft | ≈ ₹7.2–9.5 lakh | Structural capacity confirmed; water tank load |
| Total over years | A G+2 house of about 1,200–1,300 sq ft | ≈ 1,200–1,300 sq ft | ≈ ₹23–32 lakh in today's money | A plan for all stages drawn at the start |
The total — roughly ₹23–32 lakh for about 1,200–1,300 sq ft of built-up area — sits at the basic construction band applied across the whole house. Built at once, the same house would cost about the same; built in stages, it costs a little more in total because of repeated mobilisation and price rises, but it never requires the family to borrow the whole amount on day one. That trade-off is the economic heart of incremental housing.
What Aranya achieved, and what it teaches
Aranya received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1995, and it has been studied by planners and architecture students ever since. Visitors and researchers describe a township that has filled in over the years with houses of very different sizes and styles, held together by the street hierarchy and the plot structure rather than by uniform facades. Like any real place, it has also faced the problems of its city — maintenance of services, changes of use and densification beyond the original intentions. These are signs of a living neighbourhood as much as of any failure of design.
For designers, the deeper lesson is about where control should sit. Doshi's team did not try to design every house. It designed the things that families cannot do for themselves — land subdivision, roads, drainage, water, power, the location of shops and schools — and it offered guidance and examples for the rest. The quality of the place came from the framework. That is the opposite of the common approach today, in which developers specify every tile of a flat but treat the space between buildings as leftover.
| Aranya idea | What it means in practice | Where it applies today |
|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure before buildings | Roads, water, sewer and power in place before families move in | Plotted developments, township schemes, row-house projects |
| Service core first | Wet areas, plinth and connections built properly at the start | Self-built houses, beneficiary-led government housing |
| Mixed incomes in one layout | Plot sizes vary; larger and commercial plots on main roads | Inclusionary housing, mixed township planning |
| Streets as living space | Hierarchy from bazaar to lane to court | Gated row-house schemes, society internal roads |
| Designed for growth | Foundations, stair and services sized for future floors | Any G+1 house that may become G+2 |
| Guidance, not uniformity | Demonstration houses and simple rules for facades and setbacks | Developer design codes for plotted schemes |
| Local builders and materials | Brick, concrete, local masons and small contractors | Lower cost and local employment in small towns |
Aranya's ideas in today's housing schemes
India's main urban housing programme, the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana – Urban, launched in 2015, includes a component for beneficiary-led construction in which an eligible family builds or enhances a house on its own land with government assistance. That is close in spirit to Aranya: the family is the builder, and the state supports rather than replaces it. The programme's guidelines set carpet-area limits for houses for the economically weaker section of up to about 30 m², which is roughly the size of the first two stages in Fig. 4. Schemes for affordable flats built in partnership with developers follow the conventional product model instead.
Internationally, the most famous recent example of incremental housing is the Quinta Monroy project in Iquique, Chile, by Alejandro Aravena's practice Elemental, completed in the early 2000s, in which families received half of a good house and filled in the other half themselves. Aravena received the Pritzker Prize in 2016, two years before Doshi. The two projects are often discussed together because they share the same conviction: when public money is limited, it should be spent on what families cannot do themselves, and the design should make the family's later additions easy and safe.
Private developers in Gujarat already use part of this logic without naming it. Row-house and tenement schemes on the edges of Surat, Ahmedabad and Vadodara often sell a ground-plus-one house on a small plot, and many buyers add a floor or a front shop within a few years. When the original structure and staircase were designed for that addition, the result is neat; when they were not, the street fills with improvised steel stairs, overloaded slabs and water tanks perched on parapets. Aaditya Interior's planning work on plotted schemes now routinely asks the developer to show the permitted future addition on the sanctioned drawings, so that buyers inherit a plan rather than a problem.
Lessons for a family building on its own plot
Most readers will never plan a township, but many will build a house on a plot in stages — the ground floor now, the first floor when the children grow up, perhaps a rental floor or a shop later. Aranya's principles translate directly. The house should be drawn completely at the start, even if only a third of it is built. The structure, the stair and the wet stack should be fixed for the final building. The front of the house should be designed so that a shop or an office can open there later without destroying the facade. And the open spaces — a setback garden, a chowk, a terrace — should be protected in the plan so that every new room does not eat into light and air.
There is also a lesson about legal and technical safety. Every additional floor must be within the building permission for the plot and must be checked by a structural engineer, because foundations and columns designed for one floor will not safely carry three. A stage-by-stage plan, prepared and sanctioned at the start, saves the family from the two most common incremental-housing failures in Indian cities: unauthorised construction that cannot be regularised, and overloaded structures that crack or worse.
| Decision to fix at the start | Typical good practice | What goes wrong if it is left for later |
|---|---|---|
| Number of floors | Sanctioned drawing showing the final height | Unauthorised floors; problems at sale or loan |
| Foundation and columns | Designed by a structural engineer for the final load | Cracks, settlement, expensive retrofitting |
| Wet stack | Toilets and kitchens of every floor on one vertical line | Long horizontal drains, leaks into rooms below |
| Staircase | Internal or external stair that can serve an upper floor independently | Steel stairs added on the street side |
| Water tank and pump | Location and load planned on the final roof | Tanks on parapets; low water pressure |
| Front use | Ground-floor front room able to become a shop or clinic | Shutters cut into walls later, weak lintels |
| Light and air | Courtyard, light well or setback kept open in all stages | Dark middle rooms as the house fills in |
Where incremental housing is heading
Three trends suggest that Aranya's ideas will become more, not less, relevant. First, cities are expanding into peri-urban land where plotted development is cheaper than towers, and where families can still build incrementally. Second, digital tools make it far easier to prepare a complete staged design, a structural model and a bill of quantities for each stage, and to share them with a small local builder on a phone. Third, prefabricated and semi-prefabricated components — precast stairs, wet-core pods, steel or light-gauge frames — could one day let a service core be delivered and installed in days rather than built over weeks.
The risk is the same as it was in the 1970s: schemes placed far from jobs and transport, with services that are not maintained, become empty plots and weed-filled roads. Aranya's success depended on being part of the city, on connections that worked and on a design that made people want to invest. Any future scheme that copies the plot sizes without copying the street life and the infrastructure will miss the point.
Rules for designing housing that can grow
- Provide what families cannot build themselves first: land subdivision, roads, water, drainage, power and a sound plinth.
- Put toilets, baths and kitchens on one shared wet wall that can stack vertically through every future floor.
- Design foundations and columns for the final number of floors, with a structural engineer's drawings, even if one floor is built now.
- Place the staircase so an upper floor can later be used independently — as a rental or for a married child.
- Organise streets as a hierarchy: commercial uses on the main road, quiet lanes and courts for daily life.
- Plan different plot sizes and income groups together rather than in separate estates.
- Draw and sanction the complete house at the start, and show the permitted future additions on the drawing.
- Protect a courtyard, light well or setback so rooms added later still receive light and air.
- Offer guidance and examples — demonstration houses, simple facade rules — instead of trying to control every house.
Frequently asked questions
What is Aranya low-cost housing?
Aranya is a township in Indore, Madhya Pradesh, planned by B.V. Doshi's practice Vastu-Shilpa for the Indore Development Authority in the 1980s. It followed a sites-and-services approach: families received serviced plots, and the poorest received a basic service core, then built their own homes over time within a planned framework of streets and open spaces.
What is a sites-and-services scheme?
It is a housing approach in which a public agency provides developed plots with roads, water supply, drainage and electricity, and households build the houses themselves, often in stages. It lowers the initial cost to families and lets each house suit its owner, but it depends on good planning, working services and sensible building rules.
Why is Aranya important in B.V. Doshi's work?
It shows his concern for ordinary people's lives and for how Indian settlements actually grow. The project applied lessons from traditional towns — street hierarchy, shared courts, houses that grow — to public housing, and it received the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1995. It is frequently cited in discussions of his Pritzker Prize in 2018.
What is incremental housing?
Incremental housing is housing that families build in steps as their income and needs allow — starting with a core and adding rooms or floors later. It works well when the structure, staircase and services are designed for the final house from the beginning, and badly when each addition is improvised.
Can I build my house in stages legally?
Yes, if each stage is within the building permission for the plot. The safest approach is to get the complete house — including future floors — designed and sanctioned at the start, with foundations and columns designed by a structural engineer for the final height, and then build in phases. Rules vary between local bodies, so confirm with the local authority.
Sources & standards
- Aga Khan Award for Architecture — Aranya Community Housing, Indore (1995 award cycle), project documentation
- The Pritzker Architecture Prize — 2018 laureate Balkrishna Doshi, official biography; 2016 laureate Alejandro Aravena
- Vastushilpa Foundation and Vastushilpa Consultants — published notes on the Aranya township
- John F.C. Turner — Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments (1976)
- Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Government of India — Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (Urban) guidelines
- Bureau of Indian Standards — National Building Code of India 2016, Part 3 (Development Control Rules and General Building Requirements); IS 8888 (Part 1) on requirements for low-income housing
- Price ranges: indicative October 2026 estimates — confirm locally before budgeting
