Envisioning a Livable Gandhinagar

  Today most of Indian cities are growing rapidly on their fringes, while their existing urban areas remain underutilized and under-served. While the macro-level plans (DPs and Master Plans) provide the overall framework for development, they cannot be successfully implemented without careful micro-level planning in both, greenfield and brownfield areas. Micro-level planning requires detailed understanding of different layers including land, real estate, environment, transport, infrastructure, cost and recovery etc. The success of these plans depend on identifying the right type of development model and mechanisms using them in the right manner. The studio was aimed at understanding the nuances of planning at local levels and the various tools it encompasses. In order to make this process comprehensive, the studio began with understanding an international case of a local area plan followed by being assigned to different cities in groups of four for creating Town planning schemes or local area plans based on their models. The study focussed on comprehending the region spatially and statistically along with estimating the growth and making room for unforeseen development that might come in the near future. The process for making the TP was iterative and hence the output was multi-layered. The studio also aimed at exploring unorthodox planning approaches, which are hardly applied in the  Indian context and gauging their practicality. The culmination of the whole study was proposing Town Planning Scheme for the Sargasan Kudasan area of Gandhinagar.