5 Drawing conclusions 5.1 Emerging arguments from my thesis

1. Since the development control regulations do not allow for any permanent structures to be constructed in the designated Simhastha Camp precinct, owners, who initially were farmers, have been compelled to rent their property for the activities of the new service economy that provides opportunities for income generation. This transformation is also produced due to the fact that projects of infrastructure provisioning for the Kumbh mela on private property often reduce the fertility of the land.

2. In the change from an agrarian to an urban services based economy, the builtform response to the DCRs has led to a widespread proliferation of ‘the shed’ as a new building typology on the land reserved for Simhastha Camp.

3. The shed typology tactically responds to the aspects of temporariness and permanence. Its materiality and tectonics make it appear like a temporary structure that follows the DCRs but beneath its skin, it lends to the everyday consolidation of houses, work and life. For instance, the house expands using the shed; the labour house in the nursery hides by building a shed over a pakka house; the office and shop in the nursery also expands using the shed; the streets are claimed by makeshift tapris and mobile shops. This doubleness - the tectonics of the temporary and the consolidation of life - could offer significant learnings for architectural thought as against the celebratory ideas of temporal / ephemeral / pop-up architecture / kinetic city, which picture a builtform that emerges during the event, and then dismantles and vanishes.

4. In moving beyond the concepts of the temporal / ephemeral / pop-up architecture / kinetic city, doubleness draws attention to the analogies of the ‘veil’ and the ‘residue’ as tactics to consolidate builtform and life in the post event spatialities.

5. My research makes a methodological contribution by pointing to the lacunae in studying the architecture and urbanism of religious event spaces in opposition to the everyday. It draws attention to the difference that a long duree, longitudinal study could make in developing thick descriptions of the ways in which the event folds into the everyday.

Hence after this research, I ask the question for my design exploration is:

How can this idea of doubleness be explored in rethinking of entrepreneurial and housing practices which have this rhythmic nature of builtform?