Charles Correa’s housing at Belapur, New Bombay, uses and re-interprets traditional Indian urban spatial syntax. And, by putting into practice some of Correa’s social and economic ideals, which derive from the traditionally incremental method of building, the project promises to vitalise the satellite city’s previously drear housing programme. It holds lessons for housing design and production in both developed and developing countries.

Behind the eastern coastline of Bombay harbour, the hills descend into a series of dry brown valleys, splattered with dark green scrub. This is the site of New Bombay, an idea first promoted by Charles Correa and a group of colleagues in the 1960s as a means of reducing pressure on an old city physically constricted at the bottom of the peninsula between the harbour and the Indian Ocean, yet subject to an enormous-and increasing-influx of work-hungry country people. Instead of expanding further and further up the road and railway links of the peninsula, Bombay should, suggested Correa’s group, colonise the undeveloped land on the other side of the great natural inlet of the sea and set up water communications between mother city and satellite.