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The TREADS Initiative with the support of National Mission for Clean Ganga (NMCG) invites you to the ninth talk in its Water-centric Master Planning in India series on:
Regenerating Riverfronts: A Framework for Indian Cities
Friday, 18th July 2025, 3:30 PM IST
Speaker:
Nishant Lall, Founding Director, NilaA Architecture and Urban Design
This event will be held in a hybrid mode at the CPR Conference Room and online over Zoom. Please register to attend.
About the talk:
The talk will explore how water-sensitive urban planning and urban design can help reimagine our cities, offering a mix of vibrant public spaces along with an enhanced ecological network. As urban areas expand and environmental challenges intensify, it becomes crucial to design cities that respect and integrate natural systems—especially rivers—into their growth process.
Using the revitalisation of the Patna Riverfront along the Ganga as a key example, the talk will delve into how the project was implemented incrementally from 2014 to 2019. The project started with a pedestrian corridor 6 km long linking all public spaces and older ghats along the river edge into a citywide public space. The talk will focus on key learnings of the initiative, including a stronger understanding of citywide hydrology, its locational parameters in the larger watershed and design approaches that enable a series of transformations at the local level via small scale plazas, parks, ghats, decks and community anchors. The session will also highlight the importance of multidisciplinary collaborations which explore and address multifaceted challenges in improving flood mitigation, urban biodiversity, and climate resilience in cities.
About the speaker:
Nishant Lall is an urban designer/architect from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2010 he founded a New Delhi-based design practice called NilaA Architecture and Urban Design. The studio focuses on integration of urban design, ecological and architectural implementation projects. Key projects include Patna Riverfront revitalisation funded by World Bank, Karol Bagh Urban Design and Delhi Riverfront Cultural district along ITO, and Varanasi Riverfront Urban Initiative. In 2023, he received 3 awards from the American Institute of Architects (International Chapter) for the Patna Riverfront Project. He has also worked on the Flood Modelling Center as part of a World Bank-funded project under the Kosi River Development Project which is now in the completion stage.
He was a consultant at the World Bank working with the Disaster Risk Management and Climate Change group from 2016 to 2024, where he worked on flood recovery initiatives in Visakhapatnam and Srinagar.
He is currently a Visiting Professor at the Department of Urban Design at School of Planning and Architecture (SPA), New Delhi
During 2001-2010, while working for renowned firms in the US, he worked on key projects like UPenn Vision Plan 2030, Cambridge North-Point plan adjacent to MIT, and Beijing 798 Cultural district plan. He was a part of an urban research group in LA under Pritzker prize winner Thom Mayne, which is now under UCLA.
