Infill Village
A scalable urban prototype for housing where people actually need it.
5 min read
Jaipur, India is home to roughly 700,000 people who lack affordable, secure housing within the city. Government efforts have failed to address the problem because the dominant policy responses ignore the one factor that matters most to people: location. This project reframes affordable housing as a product design problem: starting with how people actually live, identifying an overlooked resource in government-owned infill lots, and designing a scalable typology that houses 500 or more residents per site at dignified densities without displacing them from the urban networks their livelihoods depend on.
Problem
One in four Jaipur residents, roughly 700,000 people, lack affordable, secure housing within the city. The majority are domestic migrants from rural areas who came for economic opportunity and found themselves priced out of the formal housing market and into informal settlements, where average dwelling sizes of 5.9 square meters house families of five, sanitation is shared among hundreds, and open space is virtually nonexistent at 15% of site area.
The government's responses have compounded the problem. Slum clearance displaces residents without providing alternatives. Exurban development relocates people far from the jobs, markets, and social networks that make urban life viable. Both approaches treat housing for the urban poor as a shelter problem when the fundamental reason these people came to the city is about location. The people most in need of affordable housing are also the most dependent on the economic density that only the city center provides, and the solutions being offered consistently strip them of exactly that opportunity.
Research
Research for this project began with a question that most housing policy skips: how do people in Jaipur's informal settlements actually live? Working with data and drawings produced in collaboration with other UVA India Studio participants, including primary field documentation from Jaipur, I mapped the material conditions of informal settlement life against formal middle-class housing to understand what residents actually had, what they lacked, and what they had adapted around.
The comparative analysis surfaced a critical finding: informal settlements, despite their extreme density (1,440 dwellings per hectare versus 151 for formal middle-class housing), are not simply deficient versions of formal housing. They are highly adapted responses to urban life, located precisely where residents need to be, organized around shared resources, and spatially responsive to the rhythms of daily work. They have real problems, like inadequate sanitation, insufficient private space, and structural vulnerability; however, their location in the city is not an accident.
A parallel GIS analysis identified government-owned vacant lots distributed throughout Jaipur's urban fabric. These underutilized parcels were already in public hands, already in the city, and already near the economic networks residents depend on. In other words, the resource needed to solve the problem already existed. It just hadn't been framed as a housing resource.
Insights
Three insights emerged from the research that reframed the problem entirely.
The first was about user needs. Residents of informal settlements are not simply people who need cheaper housing. They are urban workers whose economic survival depends on proximity to the city. Any solution that moves them out of the urban fabric, however well-intentioned, destroys the value proposition that brought them to Jaipur in the first place. The product has to work where they already are.
The second was about supply. The conventional framing of the affordable housing problem focuses on demand: too many people, not enough units. But Jaipur has government-owned land distributed throughout its urban core that has never been inventoried as a housing resource. The supply side of the problem had an underutilized asset hiding in plain sight. The question was never whether land existed. It was whether anyone had thought to use it differently.
The third was about typology. Informal settlements are dense, adaptable, and spatially efficient in ways that formal housing is not. Rather than replacing informal settlement logic with formal housing logic, the more productive design question was: what would it look like to take the adaptive intelligence of informal settlements seriously and build on it, rather than against it? The answer pointed toward a distributed, modular typology that could occupy infill lots of varying sizes across the city, rather than a single large development that would require displacing an existing community to build.
Solution
The solution is a distributed infill typology: small clusters of affordable dwellings inserted into government-owned vacant lots throughout Jaipur's existing urban fabric. Rather than one grand development, the proposal imagines dozens of surgical interventions, each sized to its site and keeping residents within the life of the city.
Each site is organized around two building types that work together. A pair of dwelling towers stacks modular residential units around a shared services core, with each floor housing four dwellings at 40 square meters each. Sliding wooden partitions allow residents to reconfigure their space over time as household needs change. Residents can expand, shrink, or redistribute private and shared areas without structural modification. The services core provides the infrastructure that informal settlements lack: shared sanitation, communal clinic and ATM space at ground level, and solar panels with water collection on the roof. Bridges connecting the two towers double as informal gathering spaces, creating a semi-public layer between the private dwelling and the street. The ground floor of every site remains fully public.
The Bharti Colony site in central Jaipur served as a feasibility prototype, a test of whether the typology could perform at real scale on a real site. The results validated the approach and are detailed in the Outcomes section below.
Outcome
The Bharti Colony prototype demonstrated that the typology works. On a 4,444 square meter lot in central Jaipur, the design produces 100 dwellings housing approximately 500 residents, entirely within the urban fabric and within walking distance of the economic networks they depend on.
The performance metrics tell the story against the informal settlement baseline. Dwelling size reaches 40 square meters per unit, six times larger than the Jaipur informal settlement average. Sanitation improves to 10 residents per toilet, 100 times better than the informal settlement average. Ground level open space reaches 45% of site area, three times the informal settlement average. Residents gain access to solar power, water collection, a communal clinic, and flexible commercial space at ground level, none of which exist in the informal settlements being replaced.
Critically, none of this requires displacing existing residents from the city. The distributed nature of the typology means it scales across the inventory of government-owned infill lots identified in the GIS analysis, absorbing housing demand incrementally rather than through large-scale clearance programs. Each new site is another surgical intervention, improving conditions for 500 or more residents without disrupting the urban fabric around it.
The approach also scales beyond Jaipur. The modular design and distributed, surgical logic of the typology can be adapted for different climates and cultural contexts, making it a viable framework for relieving urban low-income housing shortages in cities around the world. The core insight, that affordable housing is a location problem before it is a shelter problem, is not specific to India.
The prototype established that the approach is feasible. The remaining question is one of political will and implementation: whether governments choose to use land they already own to house the people who already depend on it.
Reflection
This project taught me something that has shaped how I think about every problem since: the most important design decision is determining what question to answer.
The government in Jaipur was asking, "how do we get people out of the slums?" The answer to that question produces slum clearance and exurban development, which almost always fail to produce the desired outcome. The more useful question turned out to be "why do people need to live in the city, and what would it take to let them do that affordably?" That shift in perspective revealed where the critical intervention points actually live.
I also learned something about the relationship between scale and ambition. The distributed, surgical approach is less visually dramatic than a single grand development. It does not produce a landmark. It produces 500 better lives per site, multiplied across a city. Sometimes the best solutions are the ones that blend seamlessly into life rather than announcing themselves.
What remains unresolved is implementation. This was a graduate research project, but the design works, the land exists, and the need is documented. What the project cannot solve is the political and institutional inertia that keeps the land unused and the people in precarious housing. That gap between a validated approach and a deployed one is where the real problem lives.