Reading a Riverfront Settlement Before Designing In It: A Ten-Layer Survey Method Demonstrated at Wazirabad, Delhi

"Riverfront redevelopment in India is routinely designed from imagery rather than from evidence. Proposals arrive with formal language already fixed — stone steps, hard plazas, formalised edges — and site study is used to justify that language rather than to constrain it. The result is a recurring failure type: schemes that are culturally plausible, visually competent, and hydrologically wrong for the ground they occupy. This paper proposes that the corrective is procedural rather than stylistic, and sets out a ten-layer pre-design survey method for riverfront settlements...