THE TIME CAPSULE
My sincerest thanks to the National Institute of Design, Tanishka Kachchru, Arathi Abraham and Ayaz Basrai for their guidance. I would also like to thank Lakshmi Kv, Michelle Parmar and Anagha Anand for their help and support.
photo montage ‘Walking City’ by Archigram
Since time immemorial, designers architects and scientist have been envisioning the future. Fom purely academic to purely fictional, writers, and scholars have presented detailed papers and published books on the future. Today is the future someone had envisioned, imagined or hypothesized. And today, we design the future that would be. Cities are work in progress. They are constantly changing and growing exponentially, they are living, breathing spaces. As a designer, future
cities is an opportunity, to use these nuances to create a design intervention using the tool of design fiction.
The pols of Ahmadabad is a housing structure that comprises of a group of people linked together by cast, vocation or any other means. The pols came into being as a safety measure during the time of Ahmed Shah and the communal riots that happened during the Mughal Maratha rule. The pols have usually one or two heavily guarded entrances that are closed when there is an attack. It is said that the pols also have secret exits within it that only a few people know of. Today, the pol architecture is an
architectural marvel and initiatives have been taking to preserve it. It is interesting to look at Pols and how their future would, to look at their problems and create a design intervention that would help them. This was the base point from which the project started off.
Understanding cities is a long drawn out process. Cities are always governed by a set of visible and invisible social, political and cultural norms. The best way to understand cities of the future, is to look back at the past, and look to the present and draw out inferences and observations. The first step of research was a comprehensive study of cities, by an extensive reading of Jane Jacobs and her work. Jane Jacobs was an American author and activist, know for her influence in urban studies. Her widely popular book ‘Death and Life of Great American Cities’ criticises the new Urban Planning Policy which has brought down many American neighborhoods. Jane introduces sociology concepts such as ‘eyes on the street ’ She reasons that the decline of the cities are because they were planned, without taking into consideration, the people living there, who are its users. In particular, she talks about sidewalks, neighborhood, parks, public and private spaces. She is against the idea of classifying areas based on industrial and residential uses. Diversity and functionality brings variety to a city, it is what gives it character and vibrance, she says. For example, in a highly industrial neighborhood, with nothing but office buildings, it is occupied by people only from 9 in the morning to 5 in the evening, office hours. The rest of the time, it is uninhabited. It becomes a ‘ghost space’ and attracts people who have been displaced by their former habitats, like muggers, robbers, perverts and so on. It is interesting how she talks about different elements of a city, through the eyes of the people. “Liveliness and variety attract more liveliness; deadness and monotony repel life “ quotes Jane Jacobs.
RESEARCH PART I
“Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.” Jane Jacobs, Death and Life of Great American cities
Jacobs recommends four pillars of effective city neighborhood planning: To foster lively and interesting streets To make the fabric of the streets as continuous a network as possible throughout a district of potential sub city size and power. To use parks, squares, and public buildings as part of the street fabric, intensifying the fabric’s complexity and multiple uses rather than segregating different uses. To foster a functional identity at the district level. Jacobs ultimately defines neighborhood quality as a function of how well it can govern and protect itself over time, employing a combination of residential cooperation, political clout, and financial vitality. “A successful city neighborhood is a place that keeps sufficiently abreast of its problems so it is not destroyed by them. An unsuccessful neighborhood is a place that is overwhelmed by its defects and problems and is progressively more hapless before them.”
RESEARCH PART II
Step 2 was walking along the pols of Ahmedabad and observing Jane Jacobs sociology theory come to life. You can see the layers of meaning and significance in terms of architecture and culture as one takes a stroll. There are animals, there are people washing clothes, getting a haircut. Nothing works alone, they all work in tandem, each getting meaning from another. The pols are a system of how a group of people live and work, and create, a neighborhood. It works well because it was made for the people who use it and
who live in it. The research involved understanding these nuances that lay beyond what the eye can see, a zoomed out view, a macro to micro approach to the pols of the city.
“Asia is still dominated by sky scrapers. I hope that, in European countries, it will become a declining trend. They were almost never necessary � Rem Koolhaas, Architect and Urbanist
RESEARCH PART III
The happenings in the pols could be broadly classified into five categories : Activities, Animals, Architecture, Socio-Cultural Values and Pedestrian issues.
photo montage ‘Instant City’ by Archigram
The 2050 scenario was built on a fictional approach. The base scenario, as suggested by Ayaz in one of the assignments in class was imagining how the Mars Mission would affect people living in the pols. Building on it, the scenario expands to look at how global warming alters weather all over the place. Days are shorter, but intense. People start using solar panels, solar powered car, and solar powered signboards. The solar panels take a whole new shape where they are stylishly integrated to buildings. Navigation within the pols become easier for visitors. Each pol installs smart map that guides a stranger through the narrow streets within the pols, which can be quite disorienting. With the prices of land going up, they retain the verticality of the architecture. Interaction between people change, where there are fewer people on the streets and the pace of daily activities change.
There are now laundry services, instant chai, wending machines and so on. To beat the rising temperature, scientist grow specialised plants, a result of hybridisation and fertilised with clinical fertilisers. These plants act as a great way of combating the rising heat. People start their own greenhouses. Sales of self illuminating paints go up after it becomes a huge success in the pols. Installation of elevators in the pols for the aid of the elderly. Quality of life improves and average life span increases. The Mars Mission kicks off well and people from the pols are recruited to live in Mars. Mock Up space suits and space gadgets become available.
The idea behind the project was to preserve the identity of the streets, which in the future can be looked at a quantum of information. Information as to how people behaved, how they dressed, the architecture and the language of the pols and so on. It was inspired by the Andy Warhol Time Capsule Project. Warhol had a habit of keeping everything that belonged to him in brown boxes and with their year. When the Warhol Museum was built, they dedicated a gallery to all his items. The project is ideally the same thing. It is about preserving information about the present, for the future and what would be of use to the future, keeping in mind the scenario.
The deliverable would be illustrations of the street scape of 2050 and 2015 and a photo journal that would act as an anchor point for the visualisations. It would then be projected onto a wall so that people get to experience how the streets would look like. The aim was also to make people think about things that would change over time. The user of the pols are the people living there, what happens if you change those elements, how would people adapt or react to such a change ?
some of the initial sketches
adding colour and detail.
final visualisation of 2015
Final photo montage, 2015
2050 scenario
2050 photo montage.
The aim of the photo journal was that it would act as a guide to the whole visualsiation. It purpose was multi faceted. It would act as a document that captures some of the things that are already in the drawings, acting as a testament to the fact that the 2015 scenario was not just imagined. It also shows in detail some of the things that the drawing does not capture, the smaller details. Both of it work together, to give a sort of zoomed out approach to the whole idea of the pols.
CONCLUSION
Instead of just having a static image projected, I thought it would be interesting to add sound and animate it slightly so that it could be more dynamic. (attaching video link below ) From the first sketch to the last montage, there were about 50 drawings, and with each drawing, I realised something new. Cities are in fact a work in progress, and over time, how you see cities and understand them changes. There is so much happening and so much has already happened in the world today that the very notion of inhabiting spaces are changing drastically. It also made me question some the of the values we have today and whether it was important to trade them in to adopt something new and unnecessary. So yes, cities are a work in progress, and there is always something new you can do every time.