Ayn Rand move over: In Pune, India, shantytown residents 'design by consensus.'

• A local, slice-of-life story from a Monitor correspondent.

Howard Roark wouldn’t agree. Fiction’s most famous and exacting architect, in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” eschewed the idea of modifying his designs to please others. But an architecture firm in western India's Pune city says its experiment in “design by consensus” is leading to better blueprints.

The Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centers and the National Slum Dwellers Federation, two nonprofits focused on housing rights, brought Stockholm-based architects Filipe Balestra and Sara Göransson to Pune last year to work on the designs for upgraded shanty homes. Construction was scheduled to begin this month.

As the designs were developed, the architects met frequently with shantytown residents, sometimes using styrofoam models to show what the new homes might look like. After each meeting, based on residents’ input, the architects reworked their designs.

“The aesthetics of it will emerge from the people’s aspirations,” says Prasanna Desai, who heads the architecture firm that is constructing the model homes. “Call it ‘people’s architecture,’ ” he says.

Unlike middle-class families, many lower-income families use their homes as their workshops. That led architects to add an aangan, or front stoop. The semipublic area is a place to take a nap, wash clothes, or do piecework while chatting with neighbors.

The design also acknowledges the incremental way shanty homes are built – with an extra floor added as the family expands. In the new design, an extra-high ceiling allows families to insert a second floor and subdivide one room into two without altering the outside structure.

The 270-square-foot homes – tiny because they must be built on the footprint of the old ones to conserve the neighborhood fabric – will cost the equivalent of about $6,500 to build, 90 percent of which is being publicly funded under a national urban renewal program.