Smarter Urban Villages
12:00 PM, 6th November, 2013
Presented by: Surbhi Kamboj, Rojan Thomas Joseph, Rajesh Kuppili, Anushri Kumar, Syed Husain Aijaz
Advisor: Amritha Ballal
Advisor: Amritha Ballal
When cities started to engulf the village settlements, the Urban Villages became the battlegrounds of the faceoff between the rural and the urban; the informal and the formal. Today, they are the remains of the villages’ still struggling to exist in a parallel unmatched space of the ever-growing city. The seminar explores whether the smartness is in the “village” or in its urbanness and how they can be made smarter by an active dialogue with the city.
When an expanding Delhi came in contact with villages, it took over their agricultural lands and demarcated the village by a ‘Lal Dora,’ with a justification to ‘protect’ and ‘preserve’ their identity. In the past decades, these villages were shunned from the development processes occurring beyond the Lal Dora boundaries. Forced into shifting from their agrarian economy, the villages became the center of informal housing and commerce, as the developing city was inefficient to provide for all the sectors of the society. Without adequate planning and regulations, the transition of the village into an Urban Village was characterized by haphazard development. The Urban Villages of Delhi, today, suffer from poor physical and social infrastructure, a dying social cohesiveness and cultural bonding, and absence of an environment conducive to produce responsible, skilled, and productive citizens which is necessary to create a sustainable, inclusive, resilient, and authentic lifestyle for a smarter community. The diversity of Urban Villages in Delhi in terms of identity and character, calls for diversity in planning so that each village can be dealt with strategically, by solutions specific to the needs of that village. This requires for specific ingenious interventions to create a more engaging and integrated urban village in the city which is self- sufficient, less dependent and more productive to the city. The seminar delves into the approach to planning and development strategies for creating smart communities within the urban Villages contributing to making the city of Delhi smarter. It stresses upon how the smarter approach for the city would be to rectify the mistakes it made in the past and reform its approach towards villages yet to be urbanized to create smarter urban villages from its birth. |