Man cannot achieve a high level of economic life or culture in an environment whose resources he has plundered and defaced. And if even an economic sys-tem demands a balance between energy income and outgo, human culture demands a still greater degree of discrimination and care in the use of the environment: a more active sense of... See more

Thus, in locations like Shimla, Indians have acted like simple landlords, instead of caretakers of a rich urban landscape constituted of architectural heritage of immense value

And the future of a society is bleak, indeed, if, with all the resources of modern times, it is unable to understand that not every parcel may be built on in the same manner, or that it is undesirable to build in every part of a natural setting. This is especially true in mountainous regions, where humility and veneration toward nature should be a... See more

It is further ironic that, as kath-kuni and dhajji construc-tion are now nationally recognized as earthquake-resistant traditional building techniques, the knowledge needed to produce and conserve them has been lost in areas like Shim-la, where they were once widely employed

Global branding has overturned local businesses

Shimla’s present population is already ap-proximately three times that for which its services were de-signed, and this excludes the seasonal tourist influx

The core concern identi fi ed in this report is the disconnect of the native with nature caused by the transformation of an orthogenetic settlement to a heterogenetic city

This raises an important question. Is the ongoing deterioration of the urban fabric the result of an indifferent social attitude and local ignorance concerning the importance of ecological and architectural conservation? Or does it derive from the origi-nal stark cultural difference between the colonial town’s two resident groups, which never... See more

Meanwhile, present construction activity has largely been left in the hands of unskilled laborers from states like Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand, or Bihar. Many of these migrants have upgraded themselves to contractors, but their construction knowledge is more suited to flat sites, typi-cal of the areas where they originated. Applied to a hill sta-tion,... See more