Saturday, April 28, 2018

KRVIA MASTERS THESIS: 2018


How cities treat its natural reserves & ecology, how its cultural phenomena re-invents or reproduces its own city or how cities social conditions is a product of reciprocal influences, can there be an Urban Form that investigates the phenomena or addresses the issues?. The cities are place and phenomena of structured complexity and sometimes it produces culturally competitiveness with its artifacts and architecture, or often produces the conditions of incongruity. The Krvia Masters theses are an attempt to address some of the issues that are closely knitted with it. The tenth graduating group of students made an attempt to review  critically the grey areas or gaps between the urban knowledge system. The good city form is a question of how much of legibility, orderliness vs everyday and how it sustain the balance if any?. The development of conceptual structure for building research question is strikingly moving away from earlier trends and thesis structure further reinforces the idea of methodology and methods. Although design competitiveness is still underplaying, but there is great possibilities in its method to expand and formulate the design ideas. It shall all depends on how much of scholastic intent moves forward into the practical dimension of profession or how much the market forces that is shaped by academic ideas, perhaps future shall determine in making.
























Thursday, March 29, 2018

CITY RENEWAL & URBAN RESTRUCTURING



The post-1990s experience in Mumbai represents urban renewal processes as in other cities of Asia. As a city that is topographically challenged with land constraints and ageing infrastructure housing redevelopment is a response towards decongestion of the inner city and densification of the suburbs. This, in turn, is linked to neo-liberal urbanism characterized by economic restructuring and greater global linkages. Under the aegis of neo-liberalism, redevelopment has accelerated signifying a bigger and bolder approach to address the long-standing problem of slums in the city. 

It points to changing governance, urban restructuring whereby Mumbai has graduated from the state-led develop mentalist industrialization (that prioritized urban infrastructure to support mass production and economic growth) of the 1960s and 1970s to the neo-liberal and market-friendly processes of the 1990s. However redevelopment, a vital part of this growth story, has resisted wholesale replacement of developmental urbanism by neo-liberal urbanism by retaining the institutional and material legacies of developmental urbanism through a tailored approach to redevelopment in different parts of the city. 

The redevelopment narrative in Mumbai has resulted in sub economic centers or integrated development with their own characteristic living and working typologies. Examples include Andheri, Goregaon, Malad, Vikhroli, Sewri and Chembur infused with their own characteristic social homogeneity that has subverted the pre-existing territorialised social and economic structure.  Mumbai is a polycentric city, with the landscape and activities increasingly fashioned around this concept. Redevelopment has also identified pockets of land that hitherto were disconnected from the economic and development processes of the city. These pockets are important land parcels in terms of location, connectivity and development potential. Redevelopment has allowed such deprived pockets to be integrated with the development process of the city.

Note: Abstract of original article written by Dr. Binti Singh & Manoj Parmar, featured in Domus India, April 2018 edition.

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

UDVADA: COMMUNITY | WORSHIP

Lots have been written on Udvada town, its importance as Parsi community town, its history and most importantly the worship place. However the recent attempt to create heritage awareness of the town has resulted positive responses from community and historians. The town is an agglomeration of various architectural typologies (by functions), creating unique experience and bringing sense of place and community living. It is necessary to not only document the place but also disseminate the important lesson on "what is sense of place and heritage". 











































Ethical and Moral Construct of Modern