1 Link: Ente Kochi
Client / Location Kochi Municipal Corporation
Year / Status 2020 / Conceptual
Typology Urban Design Intervention / Competition Entry
Collaboration ∫de(x) / integral_de_x.instagram.com
The development of Kochi has been historically characterised by a free market bias towards the construction sector with practically no concern for neither improving general infrastructure and the quality of urban environment nor implementing a regulatory framework to control and manage growth, creating an unbalanced urban spatial and demographic structure. Despite a positive annual GDP growth rate of 7.5%and an excess of 18.12% in housing stock, the city has been unsuccessful in providing affordable housing and services for its urban poor, forcing them out of the centre either for living or for work, resulting in a massive 91% inter-city daily traffic share. This has further worsened the city’s air quality and vehicular crowding considerably even though it has a high modal share of public transportation. The improper waste management system and a notable deficit in the share of parks and other public open spaces also reflects the poor state of urban infrastructure. Apart from health issues, open waste dumping has also affected the water carrying capacity and flow rates of the urban waterbodies and drains, including the Mullassery canal, due to perpetual clogging. This, along with large-scale reclamation of wetlands for developmental activities, has made the city a hotspot for regular annual flooding during the monsoons.
The proposed design, therefore, addresses three key criteria identified from the urban analysis:
1. Improving the inner city public infrastructure to control sprawl by providing affordable housing & community co-working and recreation spaces that reduce regular inter-city vehicular trips and installing a convenient and energy efficient alternative mode of intra-city transportation to reduce reliance on private vehicles within the city limits.
2. Installing a co-operative network of neighborhood waste collection, segregation and management centers connected by underground pneumatic tubes and supplemented by several urban recycling and upcycling stations, repair shops and efficient material storage and logistics centers.
3. Managing the urban water bodies by opening its currently closed sections and upgrading its immediate precincts as sustainable transit corridors and landscaped plazas, parts of which doubles up as water retaining reservoirs during the monsoons. This will enable efficient flood management by reinventing the waterbody as a continuous public space, encouraging people to take care by not treating them as waste dumping yards.
The overall design consists of a network of connected urban services that work hierarchically in a bottom-up manner; starting from basic neighborhood level interventions like community co-working centers, waste collection & segregation spots and makeshift low income housing modules placed over vacant roof-tops of existing buildings to enable inclusive densifying of the urban core. The existing low-rise, high-density development along the canals provide an optimal setting for the same. These micro urban inserts are then connected by loops of green transit corridors serviced by electric trams or boats or bicycles or pedestrian friendly walkable streets or a combination of these while the waste collection points are centrally linked to regional waste management facilities via underground pneumatic tubes. A network of such loops, intersecting at strategic points with existing metro, railway and inter and intra-city bus lines and regional service facilities complete the regional mega-loop. The proposed pilot project consists of strategically placing water reservoirs along Mullassey canal on the existing valleys between M.G. Road & T.D. road to control monsoon flooding and between Market road & Shanmukham road to control tidal flooding. These reservoirs form part of larger public urban nodes like the KSRTC station, the redesigned Fashion Street and the proposed Vertical Re-cycling Centre at Market Street, along the Mullassey Tram Corridor and thereby become usable spill over spaces by facilitating seasonal access. The re-imagined compact KSRTC terminal become part of an integrated sports facility and a wetland bio-park.
