Christopher Charles Benninger

Who is Christopher Charles Benninger?

Christopher Charles Benninger is an American-Indian architect and planner born in the United States in 1942. He studied urban planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and architecture at Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where he later taught.

Benninger studied under Josep Lluis Sert and worked in his studio. He was a protégé of the noted economist Barbara Ward and a member of the Delos Symposium group, contributing articles to the journal Ekistics. He was influenced by the group's founder, Constantinos Doxiadis who led the Ekistics movement. This brought him into association with Buckminister Fuller, Arnold Toynbee, Margaret Mead and Jaquline Tyrwhitt.

On the invitation of B. V. Doshi, in 1971 he resigned from his tenured post at Harvard and shifted to Ahmedabad, India as a Ford Foundation Advisor to the Ahmedabad Educational Society, where he founded the School of Planning. In 1976 he shifted to Pune, India, where he founded the Center for Development Studies and Activities. In 1983 Benninger wrote the Theme Paper for the United Nations Commission on Human Settlements 1984. In 1986 he was engaged by the Asian Development Bank to author their position paper on Urban Development, arguing successfully the case for extending financial assistance to the urban development sector. Benninger is on the Board of Editors of CITIES journal, and on the Board of the United States Educational Foundation in India. He is a Distinguished Professor at the Centre for Environmental and Planning Technology University, Ahmedabad, and on the Board of Governors of the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi.