Apoorv GargArchitect, Urban Planner
Apoorv is a practicing professional of spatial planning, urban design and architecture with more than ten years’ experience of working in countries of Europe, Africa and Central Asia and have been associated with organizations like UNWTO, Asian development bank, World Bank and similar others. His interest lies in interacting with people of different ethnicities, which he practices through work. This further interest in exploring the subjective and objective complexities and challenges of the domain seeking inclusion through egalitarian processes and design solutions. Currently, he is associated with ADB as an Urban Design Specialist to help improve integrated and innovative solutions for liveable cities in Bangladesh. Before this, he was engaged with UNWTO as a spatial structure specialist for a tourism project based out of Dushanbe, Tajikistan. Here he was responsible for identifying the area planning and architecture design based regulatory framework, for mountainous and environmentally sensitive areas; and tourism zones, special zones and tourist areas foreseeing future potential and demand. Also, he was associated as an Architect consultant on a World Bank category ‘A’ project in Barikab, Afghanistan, where he was responsible for planning and designing the liveability needs of sixty thousand workers of an agro-industrial park of 450 acres. In a related project of preparation of a master plan for 6 towns of Himachal Pradesh in India, he was involved in defining the building regulations and standards for the towns, as the region has steep and difficult terrain. Additionally, as a senior program officer with AIILSG, a 93-year-old India based NGO working towards inclusion in urban governance, where his engagement as a senior researcher included restructuring the entire state’s city planning, building permission and architecture construction-related acts, rules & design guidelines under the project titled as “Government Process Reengineering'' (GPR). This project allowed him to explore the urban design framework in the core of government machinery for urban/ rural management in cities and develop “enterprise architecture” based solutions to refine decision making processes addressing the United Nations Global e-Gov index. As a senior urban designer with Voyants Solutions Pvt. Ltd., Gurgaon, India for a project-based out of Tanzania, he worked towards waste management, water supply, and supply chain management through a project titled special economic zone (SEZ) in consultation with South Korean counterparts. There they involved the community in owning their surroundings and creating balance by understanding its association, changes, and impacts on the larger landscape. With L. K. Associates, London, as a team member, he was a part of the team designing the “Great Bowden master plan” for 20,000 housing units and an assessment of 8 towns around London, observing the typological & public space structure of the region to introduce a coherent farm-based residential neighborhood. As he thrives from a diverse and complex country, he believes to bring a perspective to the present multi-layered and complex context.