Introduction:
StudioPOD is an international multi-disciplinary planning and urban design practice, with their headquarters in Mumbai, India, and an office in Dallas, USA. POD stands for People Oriented Design, which is the main philosophy of the firm. Since 2013, StudioPOD has worked extensively in multiple regions across India and in UAE. Our projects are of varying scales that include strategic and regional plans, transportation and campus plans, landscape urbanism, placemaking and streetscapes.
Firm Philosophy:
People Centric Design
Our Urban Design practice pushes the conventional design boundaries with ideas and principles that focus on people-centric design. We plan for cities and social spaces that foster resiliency, vitality, ecology, and community. By transforming neglected under-utilised spaces to vibrant places for people and ecology, we believe that informed and contextual design rooted in its place helps in a truly sustainable city building process.
Collaborative
We listen – we Learn, and we Improvise, constantly. The area of practice largely belongs to the urban realm and millions of micro challenges that come along with it. The team specialises in collective inputs from all stakeholders and assimilating a mutually agreeable way forward that pushes design excellence and systems thinking as various scales.
With the growth of urban India, it has been quintessential to look at planning and urban design in an integrated manner of systems-thinking through different lenses.
Urban Design practice based in India but designing for the world.
StudioPOD is one of few dedicated urban design and planning practices in India. We have been one of the torchbearers, championing the discipline of urban design and landscape urbanism in the past decade. With our highly adaptable and collaborative practice that deals with urban transformations and infrastructure, we have been able to position urban design in the mainstay of several urban development, infrastructure and transport led projects in India. This unique proposition has led to several interesting projects in the public sector. Similarly, our positioning for development within the private sector has gotten interest from several of the leading developers in India. They now see urban design as a specialized role that need to be hired, for integrated and holistic master planning exercises revolving around the three pillars of sustainable urban development.
Championing public realm in the land of great architects
With their rich historic and social context, Indian cities offer tremendous opportunities for integrating significant public spaces with infrastructure upgradation. Public Realm between the buildings and our city infrastructure can become incubators of urban life in Indian cities. For an Urban Design firm, this is a constant exercise of zooming in and zooming out. New opportunities could be created to develop a better and impactful public realm that can truly transform the quality of life in our urban environment. Boosting the liveability of cities through this innovative integration will make Indian cities truly smart and help transform spaces into successful places. This has been the core philosophy for all our projects at StudioPOD.
The context that we are in, puts us in different roles varying from consultants, activists to advocacy for core issues. We have now completed 60+ projects globally that include some implementation projects recently completed in the public and private sector.
Team:
With a 30+ changemaker and growing, StudioPOD brings together a team of multi-disciplinary professionals with different skill sets and strengths bound by a common ethos of people-oriented design. Our talented team of urban designers, transportation and city planners, architects, landscape urbanists, way-finding specialists, graphic designers and real estate strategists collaborate on multi-scalar projects with a keen eye for innovation.
Our highly collaborative approach allows us to work seamlessly with private- and public- sector clients such as local municipal corporations, development authorities and other government agencies to bring about real-world positive change to our rapidly urbanising environment.