In 2008, Sanjeev Shankar’s Jugaad canopy in New Delhi transformed 945 discarded oil cans into a 70-square-meter shelter, showcasing grassroots ingenuity and redefining waste. Created with the help of 90 Rajokri residents, it highlighted sustainability through collaboration, earning global recognition and sparking conversations about reuse and consumption.
In December 2008, a shade appeared in New Delhi made entirely of things other people had thrown away. Sanjeev Shankar’s 'Jugaad Canopy' took 945 discarded cooking-oil cans and turned them into a free-standing, suspended shelter spread across 70 square metres. It debuted at the 48°C public art festival, supported by Khoj, the Goethe-Institut and German Technical Cooperation, and for ten days it quietly made an argument about what counts as waste.
What makes the piece linger is how it was made. Over three months, 90 residents of Rajokri, an urban village in the city, worked on the cans alongside the artist, drawing on grassroots ingenuity rather than imported expertise. Jugaad, the Hindi word for getting things done with whatever is at hand, is less a design theory than an everyday habit, and the canopy gave that habit a stage. That may be why it travelled so far, from the Architectural Review’s Emerging Architecture awards to exhibitions in New York and at RIBA in London, and into books on collaborative design.
Which raises an uncomfortable question: has sustainability gotten worse since 2008? In several ways, I think it has. Global emissions have kept climbing, plastic production has kept growing, and convenience has become the default, with fast fashion, same-day delivery and a box inside a box inside a bag. Meanwhile, “sustainable” has become a marketing adjective, stamped on bottles and T-shirts by companies whose business depends on selling more of them. Somewhere along the way, reuse stopped being a necessity and became a product category.
It isn’t a one-way slide, though. Solar and wind are dramatically cheaper than they were in 2008, and electric vehicles have gone from curiosity to common sight. The trouble is that these gains keep being outrun by growth in consumption, so the overall picture improves in pieces while the total load keeps rising.
That is why a canopy of oil cans still feels quietly radical. It treated waste as material and neighbours as collaborators, rather than treating the planet as a problem for better gadgets to solve later. Perhaps the lesson of Jugaad is that that we need to relearn something simple: use what is at hand, and use it fully.
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