The deaths of Ashish Bose (April 2014), K.C. Sivaramakrishnan (May 2015), M.N. Buch (June 2015), Charles Correa (June 2015), and Sayed S. Shafi (December 2015) have taken away an entire generation of “urban giants” who spent much of their lives studying the phenomenon of urbanisation, writing about its myriad facets, and contributing to the urban thought processes.

Ashish Bose, my senior in Delhi School of Economics, was an urban demographer who worked with population census numbers, wrote his Phd dissertation on India’s urbanisation with Bert Hoselitz (University of Chicago) as his mentor and examiner, and produced on his 80th birthday a book called Headcount: Memoirs of a Demographer. Fond of coining acronyms, he shocked the establishment by calling Bihar, MP, Rajasthan and UP the “Bimaru” states, and subsequently came up with other acronyms like Gem (generators of economic momentum) in the context of the report of the National Commission on Urbanisation.

K.C. Sivaramakrishnan, a West Bengal cadre IAS officer, developed his interest in urbanisation at the Calcutta Metropolitan Planning Organisation (CMPO). Tutored in looking at a metropolitan city, the complexities of managing multiple cities that formed a metro like Calcutta fascinated him. It was his fascination that resulted in a book, Governance of Megacities: Fractured Thinking, Fragmented Setup. KCS’s interest in urban issues strengthened over the years. He was the principal architect of the Constitution (65th Amendment) Bill that got defeated in the Rajya Sabha — KCS documented the entire journey of the bill in Power to the People? An event he called the most extraordinary was his transfer from the sports ministry — where he openly admitted he would have found it difficult to distinguish between hockey and cricket. He took leave and spent the interregnum at the National Institute of Urban Affairs. His spirited moment was The Enduring Babu: Memoirs of a Civil Servant.

Mahesh Buch was an IAS officer of the MP cadre. He belonged to a family of administrators and believed, unflinchingly, in the primacy of his class and in its astute decision-making. A contemporary of Manmohan Singh at Cambridge, he came to the urban forefront in Bhopal, with his undivided attention to urban environment and the development of lakes and forests, and subsequently, at the Delhi Development Authority. He was outspoken. Soon after the 2002 Gujarat riots, he wrote to Narendra Modi <http://indianexpress.com/profile/politician/narendra-modi/>, then the chief minister, to remind him that the PM of Pakistan had undertaken to reconstruct Hindu temples in Karachi, and urged him to do the same in Gujarat to assuage the wounds inflicted on Muslims.

Charles Correa, a product of Michigan and MIT and globally recognised as an architect with a difference, earned his fame as much with the design of Bharat Bhawan in Bhopal as with the National Commission on Urbanisation that he chaired. Correa, along with Buch and Bose, produced a seven-volume report setting out what needed to be done to address issues of urbanisation, urban planning, urban land, urban poverty, urban finance and management, etc. It’s a magnum opus that would serve as a guide for those currently responsible for urban-sector initiatives.

Sayed Shafi, a student of Lloyd Rodwin at MIT, joined the Town and Country Planning Organisation (TCPO) upon its establishment in 1956 and rose to become its chief planner. His seminal work at the TCPO was the preparation of the first Master Plan of Delhi. He came to be known in public life for his evidence before the Justice Shah Commission set up to investigate the excesses during the Emergency. Shafi, an original resident of Old Delhi, prided himself on being a part of the team that prepared a plan for Mecca. He put his heart and soul in the preparation of a volume on Jawaharlal Nehru’s writings on art, architecture, heritage, cities and city-planning to mark Nehru’s centenary. To Nehru, as recounted in the volume, Delhi was like no other city in India. Shafi records that Nehru wanted to know how the “age-sex ratio” is relevant to the planning of cities. What is meant by day-time and night-time population? What is height-zoning? And what is it that planners call “origin-destination survey”?

In whatever way this generation may be appraised, there is a phenomenal storehouse of knowledge and fearless expression — be it the theoretical underpinnings of Gem, a model for governing a metropolitan area, or a simple exhortation like “expediency should not govern urban design of such an important area [Jama Masjid]”.

The writer is senior fellow and head, urban studies, Institute of Social Sciences, and member, former prime minister’s national review committee on JNNURM