VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

Every urban settlement produces its own grammar of communal gathering. The tamarind tree, the pol, the shared courtyard — each emerged from how people actually lived, not from a design brief. In Indian cities, this spatial tradition passed through vernacular courtyard houses, the colonial drawing room, and post-independence standardisation of interior layouts, eventually arriving in the developer-driven apartment as two rooms: the living room and the balcony. This paper argues that the translation stopped there. Design froze. Life did not. Over the past decade, residential development across Bangalore has converged on a near-identical layout — the standardised 2BHK, the aspirational 3 and 4BHK, clubhouse, park, parking. This typology has delivered real gains: security, infrastructure, and a first foothold of home ownership for urban middle-class families. But the product has not changed in response to how that generation now actually lives. Nuclear families, young professionals, and students in shared rentals organise their lives around affordability, privacy, and individual schedules. The living room is present in the floor plan but absent in daily life. The balcony has shifted from a threshold of neighbourhood engagement to a decorative backdrop. Drawing on Lefebvre’s distinction between conceived and lived space, the paper argues these rooms are no longer designed for living — they are designed for selling. Bourdieu’s account of domestic display as cultural capital explains why this persists: communal rooms retain market value by signalling a domestic ideal no longer practised. This pilot study works through spatial analysis of developer floor plans and qualitative interviews with users from the university community in Bangalore. The research asks whether communal spaces still function as social infrastructure or survive as symbolic residues of a domestic life — and whether housing design is beginning from the right place at all.