Faculty of Planning

Master's in Urban Housing

Urban housing, apart from being a shelter, is seen as means of access to employment and livelihood, urban and community services, proximity to desirable neighbours. Majority of urban housing is supplied by the market or self-built where land, regulations and finance play a major in house price and affordability.

Access to decent housing that is affordable for all is key to a habitable city. However cities across the developed and developing countries are grappling with varying degrees of housing unaffordability as per the specifics of local land and labour markets. Policymaking and planning to ensure access to decent affordable housing for all income groups is a complex process and requires multi-pronged approach. It requires framing of policies and regulations that will enable local markets to generate adequate, affordable and decent housing stock. At the same time it requires framing of policies, programmes and regulations that will provide assistance to households, living in substandard housing not catered to by the formal markets, to access decent affordable housing. It is only when such a multipronged approach is adopted, that cities will be able to efficiently address the issue of housing unaffordability in their specific land and labour market.

With this perspective, the MUH program aims to provide applied knowledge about local housing market, policy making, planning, design and technology aspects of urban housing and project formulation and monitoring, design and technology aspects of urban housing. The programme will impart generic knowledge related to urban habitat, knowledge related to housing domain and tools and techniques required to analyse and apply solutions to urban housing related problems.  The students are trained to engage with scales from local projects to city to region in Indian and global context  through studio courses, theory courses, hands-on tutorials, directed research projects and technical guided field visits in India and abroad during summer and  winter schools.  The programme offers studios on preparing Housing strategy at city level and housing project formulation for different submarkets and supply mechanisms.

On successful completion of the program, the students will be awarded the degree of Master of Planning (Urban Housing).