Watch the full video (above) of the talk by Olga Chepelianskaia, where she discusses the potential of built heritage to address urban development challenges, through selected Asian cities’ cases, highlighting how these learnings could apply to the Indian context.

Indian cities face an unprecedented urbanisation pressure (50% of India’s population will reside in cities by 2050, UN), which reflects in a rapid and uncontrolled built infrastructure development. Such development often takes place at the expense of natural eco-systems, human scale and cultural distinctiveness, which in turn significantly compromises sustainability, resilience, social cohesion, inclusiveness and economic opportunities. Climate change and extreme weather events further exacerbate negative effects of this unsustainable urbanisation process and further deepen poverty and vulnerability in cities.

In this context, achieving the SDGs and the New Urban Agenda targets imperatively comes to reviving and harnessing on cities’ unique natural and cultural assets. Yet, the potential of built heritage to address urban development challenges in India has hardly been explored and tapped into.

Olga Chepelianskaia is an international sustainable urban development consultant, Founder of UNICITI and Program Manager of SEHER INTACH. She specialises in sustainable and climate resilient urban development in Asian cities, natural eco-systems and heritage revival, climate change and clean energy.

The question and answer session that followed can be accessed here. Find all available videos of previous workshops here.