Nidhi Sohane

Nidhi Sohane is an architect by training but is inclined towards urban development. Most of her work has been in understanding the housing ecosystem in informal settlements: the multiplicity of stakeholders, the dynamics that they are affected by, and their access to housing finance. At IIHS, she is working on visualising and tracing incrementality in informal settlements relating to choices and construction practices in self-built homes. She was Project Coordinator with mHS City Lab prior to joining IIHS. Her fieldwork was across informal settlements in Ahmedabad, Ajmer, Indore, and particularly Delhi. It involved interviewing masons, home owners, housing finance companies, material suppliers, and other actors in the network of housing.

Nidhi was also involved in the co-creation of ModSkool, a modular school designed to be dismantled as required. ModSkool is a crowd-funded and crowd-sourced project, constructed in response to the risk of demolition, which actively threatens the farming community in the floodplains of the Yamuna in Delhi. She is keen on employing her architectural training in co- creating viable construction techniques given prevalent practices. She enjoys mathematics, travelling, building things with her hands, and good music.