Architexturez South Asia
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The unique challenges of planning a New Town: the Gandhinagar experience
No full textThe New Town of Gandhinagar was built in the 1960s as the capital of Gujarat state in western India with a spacious, modern character. Over the next four decades, it developed as an administrative center, but due to development restrictions and rigid periphery control, it was not able to effectively respond to regional growth pressures. The objective of Gandhinagar’s Development Plan for 2011 was to transform it from an administrative center into a thriving and economically vibrant community able to accommodate the demands of a rapidly urbanizing economy. This plan marked a departure from the state-led master planning and development based on eminent domain, and adopted a land readjustment mechanism for urban expansion. It applied a place-based approach to preserve the formal character of the capital city, while at the same time transform the quality of its built environment. This paper provides insights into the unique challenges of re-planning a planned New Town, and particularly highlights the opportunities that urban design scenarios provide to planners to meet a variety of planning objectives. A decade later, implementation success has been limited to urban expansion areas with the realization that the legacy of state-led development is not easily overcome without accompanying institutional changes.</p
Analysing experiences and issues in self-built shelters in Bangladesh using transdisciplinary approach
No full textThere are currently 70.8 million forcibly displaced people, globally. Bangladesh hosts the largest refugee camp in the world. Much effort has gone into the research, design and delivery of mass-produced shelters. Yet most refugees live in self-built shelters using simple shelter materials. This paper aims to demonstrate the benefits of using a transdisciplinary approach for holistic data collection in such shelters. A total of 1594 households were surveyed in refugee camps in Bangladesh using diverse methods—e.g. surveys, semi-structured interviews, physical measurements. It was only because of the use of various methods that the reasons behind identified issues were discovered or quantified. For example, household surveys uncovered the issue of poor ventilation, but only the semi-structured interviews exposed the reasons behind it, while physical measurements assessed the implications of this—annual particulate exposure 13 times the recommended limit. Furthermore, several methods pointed to issues with materials, but only the focus groups discussions exposed the need for gender-sensitive technical training tailored for women on the correct use of the materials. This study demonstrates that a diverse team (humanitarian staff, building physicists, and anthropologists) using several approaches to data-gathering and working in a transdisciplinary manner has much to offer the sector, and by including quantitative physical measurements allows costed improvement plans to be developed, targets to be set and general, rather than case specific, knowledge to be generated. The findings of this study have resulted in new shelter interventions by the aid sector that were rolled out in over 70,000 shelters.</p
Conclusion: Beyond Declensionism, Towards the Useful Narrative
No full textThis concluding chapter provides the “useful narrative,” suggesting a reconceptualization of urban sustainability by incorporating social-ecological dialectics across long-term temporal scales that make invisible feedbacks and connections visible. In the midst of declensionism in the political ecology literature in general and Kolkata’s vulnerability to natural disasters or her “bourgeois” affiliations and tendencies in particular, this chapter shows how historical urban political ecology (HUPE), by capturing both clashing priorities and converging interests among multiple actors, has the potential to craft a common language of conversation between natural and social scientists and academicians and policy makers towards collective good for urban nature. It talks about how and why, through HUPE, political ecology can translate from the knowing to the doing mode, finally materializing in an “engaged praxis” (Loftus 2015, p. 180). Providing concrete examples of municipal-local, bureaucrat-technocrat-citizen interactions since the unfolding of urban nature, this chapter provides directions as to how Kolkata’s ecological subsidies can be harnessed enabling the city to re(gain) its resilience by involving everyone on board and by optimizing on exchanges and cross-fertilization across all existing domains, disciplines, knowledge, experience, and expertise. The chapter fleshes out the political commitment (along with the theoretical and methodological commitments) ingrained in HUPE and establishes how it is a very relevant, future-oriented framework, connecting the urban environmental past, present, and posterity.</p
The post(-)colonial Arab city
No full textResearch from the 1980s by Ronan Paddison, Allan Findlay and colleagues on ‘the post-colonial city' and ‘the Arab city' is examined. Distinguishing between ‘post-colonial' (as periodization) and ‘postcolonial' (as critique), the paper traces how elements of the latter permeated what Paddison and colleagues claimed about the former. A sensitivity to urban ‘models', histories and geographies beyond the Global North was evident, anticipating subsequent postcolonial moves to engage fully with the possibilities of multiple ‘other' urban trajectories, lives, plans and capacities for change. It is also suggested that, inspired by Janet Abu-Lughod, Paddison and colleagues were working towards a postcolonial ‘comparative urbanism'.</p
Everyday geographies in the changing city: subjective photo-routes in Mandalay, Myanmar
No full textThis work upholds the importance of questioning young people to find out their point of view on urban transformation and grasp their perception and representation of the changes. Hence, the paper presents the methodology and results of an autophotography activity, and more specifically photo-routing organized in March 2018 with a group of young undergraduates at Mandalay University, Myanmar. In the sphere of this activity, the participants were asked to reflect on their relationship with the urban space and to use a camera to capture significant places and situations in their everyday experience of the city, with the goal of exploring their personal point of view on the changes occurring in it, both from a tangible and intangible perspective, in addition to how they are reflected in the everyday practice of the city. The idea at the basis of the research-intervention is that the focus on everyday life through qualitative and visual investigation techniques enables the emergence of some of the—both conscious and not—more-than-representational ways in which people—a group of young adults in this specific case—perceive and live the processual nature of the city. Results show that the photo-route tool proved to be particularly effective in stimulating a critical gaze on the city and the changes underway, to acquire awareness of the constantly in-becoming nature of the places and reflect in an introspective manner on their own life course in relation to the city. Thus, the paper provides a contribution “from below” to the reflections on urban transformations going on in Southeast Asian cities and, more precisely, in Myanmar.</p
The indigenous Bedouin farmers as land rehabilitators—Setup of an action research programme in the Negev
No full textThe Negev suffers from enhanced land degradation, mostly due to lack of awareness about its state, and hostility between the region's indigenous Bedouin farmers and the authorities. In order to examine a potential solution to this 'Lose–Lose' situation, a unique project is underway, with the collaboration of the Yeroham Municipality and the adjacent Rahma Bedouin farmers' village. The concept of this ongoing Programme is based on bidirectional knowledge transfer of farming data between the farmers and land scientists, aimed to adapt Bedouin traditional cultivation methods and transform them into methods that restore the environment and are also profitable. In order to reach this goal, a highly knowledgeable Bedouin liaison person was appointed to carry out the project together with the Coordinating Team. A comprehensive study and tour were carried out in order to analyze the different landforms and Bedouin cultivation preferences. An initial survey was carried out and data from literature collected in order to determine the ecological and archaeological characteristics of the ecosystem. The area was then prepared for agricultural utilization by removing widespread garbage and dealing with wadis that have been filled with construction waste. This project, which integrates soil enhancement, agriculture utilization, and traditional Bedouin farming, aims for rehabilitation of the northern Negev gullied areas. However, the implementation of the study concept in the field is accompanied by many challenges related to Bedouin interclan communication and the diverse types of degraded lands.</p
Pakistan Papers: Louis Kahn's Designs of a Past and Future in Islamabad and Dhaka
No full textAs political questions behind Pakistan's emergence distilled themselves into aesthetic questions of how to represent a country without a past, the debate erupted through the spatial practices determining the form and architectural character of the nation's two capitols. President Ayub Khan's two ambitious urban projects—Islamabad, the new capital city of Pakistan and Ayub-Nagar (renamed Sher-e-Bangla Nagar), and a second capitol complex in East Pakistan—brought together local and foreign stakeholders with differing interpretations of the idea of “Pakistan.” A significant part of each project's documentation lies far from its site—with the University of Pennsylvania, in the personal papers of Louis Kahn, the US-based architect whose firm designed each. This collection—a vital resource to consider the expanded meaning of architecture, not as an end product, but as a process—emerges as a crucial body of evidence for the evolution of multiple narratives of the political idea of Pakistan. The design process, as documented in sketches, architectural drawings, reports, and correspondence, reflects the frictions created from unfulfilled expectations and the subsequent disillusionment of vested interest groups, shedding new light on constructions of the past and future in postindependence Pakistan.</p
Engaging the Archival Habitat: Architectural Knowledge and Otto Koenigsberger's Effects
No full textDrawing on experiences of researching India's architectural history, this article explores the affect generated by architectural archives as a source of knowledge. It traces the affective life of the archives and practices of a singular historical figure: Otto Koenigsberger, the chief architect and town planner of the princely state Mysore, the architect of Jamshedpur (a.k.a. Tatanagar, the “Steel City,” India's first planned industrial town), the first director of housing of the federal government of India, cofounder and director of the Department of Tropical Studies of the Architectural Association in London, and architecture and planning consultant at-large to the United Nations. Arguing that the affective archive has disruptive historiographical potential, the article posits that it exists fundamentally beyond the architectural object and archival documents themselves, and indeed fully in discourse with its users. The article argues for a more expansive and inclusive understanding of what constitutes an archive, designating the “archival habitat” as a place of active scholarly engagement.</p
Tropicality of Colonial Heritage Buildings in a Deltaic Landscape: British Colonial Architecture in Khulna
No full textDuring the 17th-18th century colonial period on the Indian subcontinent, British colonial architecture flourished – including in the Bengal Delta. Although colonial architecture was inherently different from the traditional architecture of this tropical region, the monsoon climate and deltaic landscape forced colonial style buildings to incorporate a number of tropical architectural features to ensure climatic comfort. In the contemporary period, due to pressure from population density, many colonial buildings have been demolished and replaced with multi-story buildings. However, the tropical forces of this deltaic region need to be evaluated in order to re-create climate responsive architecture. This study aims to identify tropical architectural features inherent within colonial buildings of Khulna, Bangladesh, a city which formed a junction in the deltaic region during the colonial period. Four colonial buildings have been selected as case studies: two residential buildings, one mixed-use building, and a school. Tropical features were analysed from photographic data, and reproductions of plans and sections of the selected buildings, in order to reveal the significant tropical architectural features of these colonial period buildings. The case studies reveal structural and design elements that aided ventilation and air flow, and controlled solar radiation, humidity and driving rain. The findings aim to encourage practicing architects to rethink climate responsiveness in contemporary buildings in Bangladesh, by revealing how, a century ago, colonial buildings were influenced by the tropical deltaic climate, which impacted foreign architectural ideology and practice.</p