I've been reading books on urban developments and one book I'd recommend is 'Cities for People' by Jan Gehl. He explores, collects and establishes how cities are being designed for everyone but people. 

Here I have tried to map and study a community in my locality that has developed in the past 10 years. In doing so, I realised the architectural and cultural connotations around the words dwelling, housing, living, and community.

I also recently studied about B.V. Doshi's Aranya Township and Kamran Diba's Shushtar Township, observing how towns and cities for marginalized communities can be created in a socially sustainable order.

The streets in the community become places of gathering and activities. I couldn't help but think of modern individualistic apartment lobbies where there are rarely any interactions. The units on every floor serve to set the families apart in a private atmosphere.
Yet on the other hand, hasty and unplanned development of these slums result in poor faculties of plumbing and electricity. Foul odors are common as well as different diseases.

A largely independently co-ordinated community dwelling emerges from these individual housing units. Land is marked, to a certain extent, and roads, and public squares show up. Shops selling essential items are opened by a few families on the ground floor, whereas vegetable and fruit sellers and 'halwais' (sweet shops) sit in the public square making the space a gathering place for the larger community. 

A good township/public housing development means for me, a practice that considers the nature of human expansion and doesn't aim for modernist views of selfish individual character but maintains a repertoire of an economically inclusive community development and social sustainability.

These communities have narrow inner streets where there is more intimacy between the house and the street. Mothers will often leave their kids to play while they go to the market down the road because they trust the space to be safe.

Wider streets will have hawkers and perhaps cars and autorickshaws with the typology of crowd also slightly changing to adapt to a more extroverted space.