The courtyard, the verandah, the shared terraces where three families would sit after dinner on summer nights. The street was narrow enough to hear your neighbour call from their window. These were not architectural features. They were a social infrastructure that planned physical conditions that made a certain kind of communal life possible. The person at the age of forty has a memory of, and almost no urban Indian under thirty has ever lived in.

They are largely gone from contemporary urban development. And their disappearance has not been neutral. Shahid Balwa has argued that understanding what we replaced them with, and what we lost in the exchange, is essential context for anyone trying to design urban spaces that actually support human life in 2025 and beyond.

From Courtyard to Corridor: How the Typology Shifted

The traditional Indian urban home, whether the wada of Pune, the haveli of Rajasthan, or the older chawl typology of Mumbai, as Shahid Balwa recalls, was all organised around a central open space. The courtyard was not a wasted area. It was the lungs of the building: the source of light, ventilation, and social life. Children played in it. Festivals were held in it. It was the space where private life and shared life met without conflict.

The shift away from this typology was driven by economics and land pressure. Courtyards are expensive to build in a city that charges by the square metre. They don't appear in the saleable area calculation. They don't photograph well in a brochure. And so they were replaced, first with internal corridors, then with lobbies that serve no social function, then with amenity decks on the 40th floor that are beautiful in the render and empty on a Wednesday evening.

The result is a generation of urban residents who are, in the language of urban sociology, space-rich and community poor. They have more private square footage than their parents did. They have less incidental contact with neighbours, less shared outdoor space, and fewer physical conditions for the kind of low-key daily social interaction that makes a place feel like a community rather than a building.

Shahid Balwa on the New Typologies Emerging in Response

The good news, as reflected in Shahid Balwa news, is that the market is beginning to correct. Not quickly enough, and not at sufficient scale, but the direction is visible. Co-living developments are reintroducing shared space as a design priority rather than an afterthought. Mixed-use ground floors are returning street life to residential buildings. Some developers are reintroducing sky gardens and shared terraces, not as amenities, but as genuinely designed social spaces with seating, planting, and a reason to be there beyond the view.

The 25 to 30-year-old resident is driving some of this. Having grown up with digital connection as a given, they are acutely aware of its limits and actively seeking physical spaces where incidental community is possible. They want a bench near the entrance where you might run into someone. A ground-floor café that belongs to the building's ecology. A children's area that is visible from the kitchen window. Small but consequential things.

Shahid Balwa DB Realty: Designing for the Life That Will Actually Be Lived

At Shahid Balwa DB Realty, the question that anchors every spatial decision is: what kind of life does this space make possible? Not what it looks like in a render or sounds in a sales pitch. What kind of morning, what kind of evening, what kind of ordinary Sunday does this layout, this amenity, this ground-floor condition make more likely?

The evolution of spaces that support human living is not a story of progress from simple to complex. It is a story of loss and recovery of features that were once intuitive being systematically removed by economic pressure, and now being slowly, deliberately built back in by developers who understand that a building's highest function is not only to stand but also enable the people inside it to live fully.

That understanding that architecture is a bridge between how humans perceive reality and the environment they inhabit is what Shahid Balwa has built his thinking around. And it is the most important argument the industry can make right now, to a generation of residents who are watching closely and choosing accordingly.