What do people need during the course of their life? The question can be answered in many ways of course, but from an urban planning perspective, what it really means is - what makes a city livable? How can a city be designed to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants? How can we reimagine the ways that land is used, to increase not only its economic output, but also the value that people obtain from it? In fact, how do you even ascertain the value people find from the spaces they exist in, in the first place? What is it that we take for granted within the urban architecture that surrounds us, and can these places be radically transformed by solutions ranging from deeply technological to mundane and simple?

Rumi Aijaz's work lends deep insight into these pertinent questions - pertinent because they are so easily overlooked.

Senior Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, aka ORF, founder of the Urban Policy Research Initiative, and Associate Member at the Institute of Town Planners of India. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx