ENTREPRENEURIAL URBANISM

"Cities often manifest, distilled and condensed activities experienced in sudden jerks and revelation. Such phenomenon often remains incomprehensible at large, especially for the academic purpose. The formal and informal market streets across the city of Mumbai are examples of such phenomenon characterized by sudden splurge of activities juxtaposed in sharp contrast to its surrounding context. These sudden bursts of activity are what this study understands as “synchromesh” giving rise to synchromesh urbanism that could be read as a quintessential feature of an entrepreneurial city. Synchromesh is a characteristic of few elements in a given situation whereby each element is always in mesh and in propelling state or state of being free or independent. The constant meshed condition that evolves as a generator or armature, constantly corresponding or adjusting all the time to its surrounding context. 

The sites representing such characteristics in various locations in Mumbai have been selected as cases for study as they symbolize this phenomenon an analogous to a working meshed condition, whose parts are networked and constantly adjusting to external pressures similar to the pressures a city exerts on its diverse geographies. This analogy is drawn in order to understand the networks of several activities and spatial forms so produced in the market streets of the selected sites in Mumbai, an entrepreneurial city in its own right." 

SYNCHROMESHED URBANISM  | Chinese University of Hon Kong | Entrepreneurial Urbanism

Authors: Prof. Manoj Parmar (Dean, Post Graduate Program, KRVIA Mumbai) | Dr. Binti Singh (Krvia Masters Faculty)

The history of urbanization in Indian context  is the key response to the social, spiritual, religious and economic needs in cities.  The economic needs and means are often overlaps with the community and identity of the precinct within the historic core of  many Indian cities.  This aspects of the city, in representation can depicts several layers of networked conditions. The inner city historic core of Mumbai also represent the similar attributes. The joint work studio attempts to identify the forces that underpin such historic networked conditions that are often being hidden. The study shall encompass the study of work places of precincts, which are typologically classifiable. It also attempts to study the nature of public realm, activity pattern along with history and heritage. The initial part of study tour focuses on the locating the bazaars or precincts with occupational identity with respect community or public realms.  

The site study were based on: direct observation; interviews; historic narratives, historical maps; histories of specific urban public spaces or spatial types; and the relevant scholarly literature from architecture and urban planning. It was important to examine the existing body of work in the various disciplines and that can be reinterpreted to make it relevant to an understanding of the such precincts and public realm, this quintessential feature of historic core  as city needs to be articulated through representation.

KEYWORDS:   

Urbanization and History Public Realm | occupational territories | mixed use housing | heritage

PRECINCTS:

Paper Market | Jewelry Market | Electrical Market | Textile Market | Metal Market | Plumbing Market

ELECTRICAL MARKET

JEWELRY MARKET

PAPER MARKET

PLUMBING MARKET

TEXTILE MARKET

UTENSIL MARKET

Drawings Credit: Krvia Masters Student (2019) & University of British Columbia, Masters of Urban Design (2019)

UNDERSTANDING RESILIENCE: WATER RESOURCES & HISTORIC CITIES OF INDIA

Water bodies are physically and spiritually an integral part of several historic cities of India. The presence of water bodies within the cities, not only added a symbolic value but also addressed the water needs of the city. The water as an urban system in context of supply and waste water are beyond the engineering domain and are important from sociological-ecological system point of view, because they form a very intricate relationship with the community and the city. However these cities are constantly transforming themselves through newer means of planning mechanisms with newer land use and newer relationships with the ecological system that are often conflicting with each other in nature. Within this framework,  the physical and spiritual essence of water continually degrades over a time period. The once privileged position of water bodies in such historic cities are subjected to land formation by land fill or are ignored as residual components, amounting to systematic encroachment of edges and deteriorating of primordial relationship of water, community and the city.

The city of Jodhpur, Bhopal and Jabalpur are few examples out of many second and third tier cities across India, where historic relationships are compromised and subjected to dismantling of an important urban component, which have capabilities to adopt newer challenges through urban water resilience strategies. The effectiveness of a water based resilient infrastructure or its responsive urban fabric and its architecture depends upon its ability to anticipate, absorb, adapt to, and/or rapidly recover from a potentially disruptive state and even ultimately shows  the ability to return to its original state only by understanding the historic water system of such cities.

The key objectives while studying and documenting such cities must firstly address the issues that are related to the understanding of the water stresses/conditions or water based stresses that may impact the city water-basin or its urban fabric and its architecture, secondly the assessment of  the resilience of the city water basin and its geographical & intervened edge conditions and finally the capability to generate and appraise interventions that yield greater resilience for the city water basin/ conditions and its geographical and intervened edge conditions.

These challenges are certainly not simple to the water related historic cities, and there are no obvious strategies towards urban solutions. But the most important question is that  the issues related to water and historic cities must be considered and debated as an academic reflection with respect to the current mode of urban transformation and see to it that  resilience must become a paradigmatic concept, beyond a passing trajectory.

Photo Credit: Manoj Parmar | Faculty: KRVIA | Jabalpur

Photo Credit: Sanaeya Vandrewala | Faculty: KRVIA | Bhopal

Photo Credit: George Jacob | Faculty: KRVIA | Jodhpur

Three cities are part of KRVIA + Breucom project & Masters Studio II for Urban Design & Urban Conservation

REFLECTIVE TEXT & ARCHITECTURAL PARADIGM

The history of built architecture has produced tremendous amount of knowledge, validating and criticizing their existence, however the need to push such knowledge within the multi-discipline terrain for understanding and locating inter-relationship is equally important and valid one. Architectural theory has representational and didactic responsibility especially when the contemporary architecture is being subjected to cultural discourses and urban discourses for its validation. Such subject of inquiry leads to the argument of need of new agendas, newer theoretical paradigms, multi-layered mode of critical analysis and plural discourses. The trends of architectural discourses are changing in global conversation and such discourses are often gets re-invented with new trajectories with radical tendencies. 

The “Reflective Text and Architectural Paradigm” intends to examine architectural paradigms through reflective text that has been operative metaphors of time, along with the philosophies that existed somewhere in the history. How such metaphors evolved, what shaped them, what is the nature of historicity and historic-ism that prevailed to have such metaphors as a reflection of time. 

The elective course at Krvia explores the idea reflective text of dominant school of thought subjecting to comparative understanding with philosophical domain. The critical agenda expands into the understanding of reflexivity. How an individual/ institutional high or low reflexivity towards specific aspects of architecture is negotiated with context and what probable outcome that were necessitated as an imperative. 

• Disobedient architectural form and Hegel text on thesis and anti-thesis
• Functionalism and Situationist Paradigm of emotional relationship between humans and objects, design and behavior & platonic truth
• Rationalism and Anarchic expressionist agenda (impulses) and Heidegger’s question on ontology.
• Imaginist : Mass production and aesthetic cleansing  and Manfredo Tafuri “Architecture and Utopia
• Expressionist: Brick wants to be an arch and Saussure Semantics
• Impressionist: Modern architecture is not a style, it's an attitude and Massimo Cacciari, Architecture and Nihilism
• Form must have content, and that content must be linked with nature and reading of Jean- Paul Satre on existentialism Function influence but does not dictate form & reading of David Hume Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals
• Less is Bore: Post-Modernist and the fun iconography and anti-design eclecticism, casual culture and intellectual fatigue, consumerism and reading on Postmodern Semiotics: Material Culture and the Forms of Postmodern Life by Mark Gottdiener

The each module is responded with larger architectural question. At the end of the module each individual develops six architectural questions and brings about the inter-relationships or influential dependencies, so as to formulate larger architectural concern, question and discourse. The resultant architectural question is represented with representational graphics.

METAPHORS AND MODERNITY: HOUSES

Houses have always remained as theoretical excursions medium to set new cannons for contemporary Architecture. The house has been re-invented number of times as one scan through the history of architecture. The act of re-invention of the house is perhaps a method of deactivating the dogmatic conditions with fresher metaphor towards contemporary life. The imagination of house oscillates between most material conditions to object of metaphor while contemporary life is an intellectual dialectic between imagination and reason or the material negotiation between two extremes conditions. 

The amount of architectural knowledge that has been built around, along with the broad theoretical speculation and metaphors within the history of houses cannot be summarized within a volume but can perhaps be illustrated with important and influential idiosyncratic philosophies, constantly operative like Ferris wheel, with changing trajectories and re-inventing itself. The broad three philosophies of design take its own trajectories  and get re-invented in various forms

The architecture of houses always dealt with the duality of transfer of form Vs. concern for the program. The harder the contrast the more it sets the challenge to contemporary living. The rationality & vitality of the program remained constant victims for seeking new language in Architecture.

Adolf Loos's work set away from formalist tendencies of form to plan in space. The sequencing of spaces was the determinant factor of organizing house programs. The ornamentation and crime is a re-invention of de-adornment of form through raum plan (the plan of volumes). The raum plan sets the new norms of conceptualization of modern life and modern means of adornment and engagement of space. 

   

House as a simple appliance was an operative metaphor, Bauhaus sets new experiment with houses as a medium for systematic rational research into the formal, technical and economic field. It was felt that the derivation of form is an act of understanding its natural functions and limitations. Such research into the nature of material and objects led to an understanding that architectural forms can emerge from a determined consideration of all the modern methods of production and construction. The formal handling of volumes nevertheless convincingly demonstrates the aesthetic presence in the reduction of a cube

Nature was too material, too individual, universal art allowed only for abstract composition, as an equilibrium of position and weight of colour. The rigorous rejection of all representational references, including the cubist and purist, led to collate the art and architecture in newer terrain. The De Stijl was concerned with the calculated of unequal masses in an anti-cubist system which exploded the closed contours of the volumetric body. The de-composition of cube led to the de-composition of program as universal & flexible, anti-dogmatic manifestation.

The re-invention of house “Machine for Living” became metaphor of modern life. The minimum form and maximum function sets new alignment to the aesthetic of house form. The modern life, the world of activity has created own functional objects, where relationships are temporary but position of objects became central to everyday living. A house is a machine for living in, it acquires clean air, full sunlight, and beauty in harmonious proportions and exaggerated sequencing of program.

The de-composition of cube also became central to tectonic operation for the quest of space itself as metaphor. The space that is de-aligned from anthropocentric or representational concerns and results in a syntactic model of interrelation without external reference. It has dialectic relation between writing
(transformation ) and reading (implicit and explicit relation. It also represents a radical confession of faith in an autonomous architecture, which entirely frees itself from criteria of habitability, strangely congenial with the emerging time of our living pattern in contemporary cities.

Photo Credit: Manoj Parmar Architects

COMPOSITION OF URBAN THEORY

The blog attempts to delineate the main ideas and methods of urban theories, that have influenced urban academics and practice. It helps to familiarize with the influential classical urban theories and contemporary urban paradigms, its principles, conceptual and physical models, analytical methods. In turn, it shall enable the research with critical review and interpretation of key urban texts, construct and present urban debate, familiarize with related key literature and other sources of knowledge; and use basic conceptual frameworks for Urban arguments. It is critically imperative to be informed with the theoretical position and time that has caused the situation, their interrelationships, spheres of influence.