A Place for Water

Gandhinagar the green city. The area that I'm currently studying is Kudasan situated on the outskirts of Gandhinagar. The journey of retrofitting the ecosystem began with understanding the environmental information for my own house. The next step was to understand the surrounding, in terms of people, activities, flora, fauna, and resources. It was interesting to find out how the area developed and how everything is connected. Observing factors like coming up of the National highway and development in the IT sector led to the rapid urbanization of the area. This leads the city to expand and as a result, the green is taken over by the gray. In the current scenario, the wide road is acting as a boundary. It cuts through the habitation and divides the area into two, it also makes people dependent on the vehicle. Apart from the physical boundary, it acts as a social boundary as it divides the people into classes. Therefore in my intervention, the idea was to design a highway in a way that at certain distances it goes below ground and creates a ground-level public plaza for conducting different activities that help in linking the two side communities. Since all the interventions imagined by 11 people were universal. A common manifesto was developed wherein we were looking at our plots for creating community space for eleven of us. The main idea was to interlink the grey with green and blue, also to go underground and create a public place. Along with creating living and working spaces in the plot area. As a response to the climate, the public stepwell is acting as a cool pocket in hot and dry days of Gandhinagar, Creating a place for water also helps to integrate the design and ecosystem. The idea was to make a place that works on its own, in terms of resources( water, electricity, food ), material.