Design Project

Thresholds on the periphery

The pandemic had changed the functioning of the APMC vegetable market in Amravati. This market holds permanent builtforms for wholesalers and retailers. But the retailers were divided into batches and alloted working days to follow COVID-19 guidelines. This brought a change in their working pattern. They started setting up a mobile market on the street nearby using hand carts and occupied the parking space which eventually resulted in parking haphazard. Market which worked as one is now fragmented into smaller units.

There were also changes in daily activities of vendors. They used footpath as threshold for activities like lunch, afternoon naps. They used nearby parked trucks for shelter. People walk along the carts and stopped using pavement. Many pull over their vehicles to carts leading to traffic.

The observed syntax was the relation between the street, pavement, plinths and arising activities. Each new level giving rise to a new activity like deactivation of footpath and activation of streets as market by means of cart. Same syntax was observed on the area of intervention where footpath was used for parking as parking space was occupied by vegetable vendors and sitting, gathering, waiting, sleeping of the vehicle drivers and vendors on the concrete pavement.

Following the similar syntax a new series of plug-ins was introduced for a shared, pop-up activities of selling, eating and sleeping by vendors to gain mild permanence and pop-up seating space for vehicle drivers and vendors on the open space in front of the commercial complex which forms the outer periphery of the APMC market so that the market can function as one again.

Plug-ins being temporary in nature can be installed and removed as an when required They also have specific elemental strategies like of tin collapsible roof, hinges which flipping movement.

Even if the selling practice or the inside is not used the outside can be used for seating with pop-up seating mechanism.