Alumna Update: Pallavi Kalia Mande — Inlaks Shivdasani Foundation Blog

Pallavi Kalia Mande is a 1998 Inlaks scholar from Darwin College, Cambridge. She has more than 20 years of experience in urban design and environmental planning and has worked on inner city neighborhood revitalization in cities all over the U.S. She worked as an urban designer and planner at Stull and Lee Inc. and for the Cecil Group, two Boston-based planning and design firms. She is currently the director of the Charles River Watershed Association.

In this week’s post she maps her journey as an urban designer and environmental planner.

Going with the flow:
Charting my journey from the Yamuna to the Charles

As a designer the interface between water, landscape and cities has always inspired me. Looking back at my personal and professional journey over the past two decades, I have traced a common theme of striving to understand the critical relationship between the natural and the built environment that has created and sustained our habitat over time. A relentless desire to enhance and restore this interface has shaped my personal and professional career path, as an architect, urban designer and a water practitioner. While I still derive inspiration for my work from the arid landscape of my birthplace in Rajasthan, India, my personal and professional interest in city design really began with my formative years growing up in the unique historical and urban context of New Delhi, India.

A firm grounding in context-sensitive architecture, urban design and environmental planning gained while traversing three sub-continents (each with its own unique geography, culture and people), has to a large extent shaped my sensibility towards city building. Having worked on inner city neighbourhood revitalisation projects in cities all over the U.S. and then interfacing closely with local community groups in the Boston metropolitan area for over a decade, I have realised that what truly drives my passion for my work is a desire to serve the most vulnerable, underserved environmental justice communities in our cities.

There is a direct correlation between the impervious cover in our cities and the quality of our natural water resources. Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is only one part of the climate equation. What we really need to focus on is replicating the natural water cycle in our urban areas while restoring ecosystems in order to sequester the vast amount of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. In fact, focusing on restoring the natural (predevelopment) hydrology in our cities is even more critical than reducing greenhouse emissions if we want to build resiliency and reverse the current trend of extreme weather events.

Despite the significant progress that we have made in broadening our approach towards city building by “accommodating” climate change adaptation strategies in our urban design and planning toolkit, we are still not fully integrating the natural water cycle into the way we think about creating resilient infrastructure.

I am currently the Director of Watershed Resilience at the Charles River Watershed Association (CRWA). In 2008 I founded the Blue Cities initiative at CRWA which promotes water-centric planning and design with the goal of restoring the natural hydrology in our cities. Building on my professional design experience and expertise in community based planning, public education and advocacy, I have effectively engaged with communities within and beyond the Charles' watershed to create unconventional planning frameworks and design solutions for addressing complex environmental challenges. Collaborating with watershed scientists, engineers and landscape architects, I have successfully implemented numerous environmental restoration projects at a variety of scales. My design practice is heavily grounded in an understanding of watershed science and engineering and I have always advocated for environmental solutions that improve the quality of life for our communities while restoring the ecological health of our land and water resources.