The Urban Housing

The course introduces the concepts of `housing-for-mass’ across space and time. The evolution of housing settlements through linking and stacking; their processes, generations, and resulting patterns are to be explored in their respective contexts exploring the balance between order and complexity. The idea, here, is to create an adaptive habitat for migrant communities associated with the very dynamic and socially interactive live-work environment. Here, “adaptability” is visualized and represented as a real space which is accommodating people from diverse cultures and traditions over a period of time. Eventually, this fluctuating habitat, over time, should be able to maintain a balance between generated orders and identified contextual complexities. In this semester approach to the site understanding and analysis was through reference materials that were made available to the students. Students were familiarized with various unorganized migrant settlements in addition to the organized tenement blocks constructed by PDW department in 1965, located between the Maan Darwaja Fire Station and Canal in the southwest corner of Surat City.