Jagan Shah
"Urban India 2050: e-Governance, Smart Cities and Butterfly Effects"

Position

Director,
National Institute of Urban Affairs,
India

Profile

Jagan Shah is Director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs (www.niua.org), the premier Indian national think-tank for the urban sector. He is recognised as a thought-leader for the development of smart cities in India and has spoken on the subject at numerous national and international forums. Shah has been closely associated with the Master Plan for Delhi since 2005 and is currently leading the effort to prepare the next Master Plan for the perspective year 2041. 

 

The NIUA provides multi-disciplinary policy, research, capacity building and monitoring support to the urban programs of the Government of India. It also works with multilateral and bilateral agencies to develop proof-of-concept projects and innovation ecosystems in various cities across the country. Its work currently covers water, sanitation & waste management, affordable housing, heritage-based economic development, transit-oriented development, municipal finance and city data analytics, in addition to basic research on the urbanisation trends in the country, including issues related to spatial expansion, the informal economy and resilience. The institute maintains a number of websites and portals and also publishes two refereed journals: Urban India and Environment & Urbanization Asia, a SAGE Journal. 

Shah is a professional architect and architectural historian & theorist trained at the School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi, the University of Cincinnati and Columbia University in New York. He has been a teacher, a writer and a practitioner and for the past decades has been focused on institution building. He is the author of Contemporary Indian Architecture (2008), co-author of Building Beyond Borders (1995) and co-editor of Round (2006) a collection of Asian writings on architecture and planning. He is a founding member of the Modern Asian Architecture Network (mAAN) established in 2001 and is a Trustee on the board of Clean Air Asia.