CULTURE FOR URBAN TRANSFORMATION

Culture is the key to our cities and it makes cities more livable, responsive and adaptable. History of urbanization demonstrates that culture is also a key to several urban trans-formative processes, enabling the formation of key civic architectural precincts, monuments, heritage, traditions and largely vibrant public realm. The public realm of the cities breaths through the social and cultural constituents formed by its historic urban fabric. The place-ness condition is uncontestably a repository of distinctive culture. The GLOBAL REPORT on CULTURE for SUSTAINABLE URBAN DEVELOPMENT by UNESCO brings about important argument on culture as sustainable model for urban development: What is the role of culture in urban development? How has culture influenced urban development across the world? How can culture make a difference for our urban future? 

Photo Credits : Manoj Parmar Architects (Hyderabad & Jabalpur)

Cities worldwide responds to globalization process of homogenizing differently and often they manifest themselves in reflected images of large cities. Jenifer Robinson in her literary work on “ORDINARY CITIES” brings about the Southern Urbanism discourse as non-hierarchical and beyond developmental-ism model. It is perhaps due to the intertwined or enmeshed condition of history, culture with globalization process in emergence.  The cultural discourse is re-emerging as symbiotic relationship between place, culture and economy (Singh, 2018). The cultural expressions give people the opportunity to identify themselves collectively, to read the traces of history, to understand the importance of traditions for their daily life, or to manifested realities. These are fundamental social and human needs that must be addressed in the context of urban development processes. How do we translate these realities into effective policies in sustainable urban planning?

The history of urbanization in Indian context is the key response to the social, spiritual, religious and economic needs in cities. The contemporary modes of planning paradigm often neglect or fail to represent the intrinsic and networked condition of Indian historic cities. There is a urgent need to identify the forces that underpin such historic networked conditions that are often being neglected in planning process and threaten this valuable relationship with diverse historic circumstances in contemporary urban development process. The emergence of cultural argument encompass the cultural territorial aspects of public realm, activity pattern along with history, heritage and enabling the cultural sustainability system within  the planning mechanism.

Perhaps its a time for bringing the theoretical inputs on place and people in forefront, sourcing knowledge by cutting across disciplines of Urban Planning, Urban Design and Urban sociology and moving towards the balance and inclusive economic development for the benefit of urban communities. There is a large benefit in safeguarding cultural heritage, the diversity of cultural expressions, strengthening of the sense of place (genius loci), and  the integrity of the urban fabric and the identity of communities.

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.