Bimanagar Housing Society, designed by the eminent, Pritzker Prize winning architect B.V. Doshi and comprising 54 identical blocks, established a social and spatial laboratory in which richly varied narratives of incremental metamorphosis played out over time. Following construction in 1987, inhabitants appropriated and adapted their dwellings, and negotiated extensions and reconfigurations amongst neighbors through a series of tactics that draw on and elaborate repertoires of informalization shared more widely in Ahmedabad and across India. A team of researchers at CEPT University Ahmedabad and Kingston University London and Central Saint Martins have compiled a systematic catalogue of tactics and their implementation using a statistical survey, interviews, measured drawings, eye-level and aerial photography. The research traces the complex and urgent question “how to build with time?” across Doshi’s project, cultural imaginaries and spatial agencies of habitants, and urban planning context to make a critical contribution to knowledge about formal/informal coproduction of space.

Íñigo Cornago Bonal is an architect, educator, and researcher. He is a senior lecturer at Central Saint Martins, leading Stage 2 in the BA Architecture course. He is also a PhD candidate at Delft University of Technology. His doctoral thesis examines the agency of dwellers in the context of the housing crisis in Europe after the Great Recession. From 2016–17 he was a teaching fellow at the faculty of architecture, CEPT University, where he was curator of the Archiprix International Workshop. He is coeditor of the Ahmedabad Cross Section (CEPT University Press, 2017) and coauthored the chapter “Open Building and User Agency: Early and Contemporary Experiments in the Netherlands” in the edited book Housing and the City (Routledge, 2021). His “Urban Toolkit” and urban design work has been exhibited in Spain, Germany, France, and India. His office, Cornago&Sánchez, has been awarded numerous prizes for their architectural and urban projects, including two European awards.

Vishwanath Kashikar is an associate professor at CEPT University Ahmedabad. His research on time-based architecture, flexibility in space use as it plays out in vernacular, modernist and contemporary architecture has been published internationally. His architectural practice includes commercial, educational, housing, and domestic projects. He has led workshops at B.V. Doshi’s Vastu Shilpa Foundation, CEPT University, ETSAM University Madrid and Singapore. His diploma in architecture degree was jointly awarded by CEPT University Ahmedabad and ETH Zurich in 2000 and his MArch by research degree in 2008 by NUS Singapore.

Christoph Lueder is associate professor of architecture and urbanism at Kingston University London. His built work includes housing estates in Ingolstadt, Germany (1998) and Anting New Town, China (2003). Since then, he has been examining alternative models ranging from coproduction to self-production of space through collaborative and participatory workshops with academic and community partners in Casablanca, Morocco; Valparaiso, Chile; Gaothan in Navi Mumbai, India; refugee camp in Amman, Jordan; and an urban village in Bangkok, Thailand. His publications on research outcomes include “Marginalised Development and Ad-Hoc Tactics for Growth” (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020); “Urban villages and informal settlements as protagonists of urban futures” (Urban Design International, 2018); “Maps as Abstraction and Imaginative Space: Representing Informal Urbanism” (Materia Arquitectura, 2014); complemented by inquiry into the architecture of publication, such as “Book-Worlds and Ordering Systems as Sites of Invention” (Routledge, 2018) and “Proximity. The Unfolding of a Koolhaasian Hypothesis in Book Space and Architectural Space” (Journal of Autoethnography, 2015).