The title of my project is ‘The city loop’ and is based in Jalgaon, a small  town in north Maharashtra. The pandemic has affected all of us and all of us have had changes in  our lives as well as observed many spatial changes in our surroundings. The process started with us observing those changes. 

The changes that I observed were, first, the idea of escape, people needed a place to escape home and a lake and the area around it became a place where people would meet, gather and go for walks. The other thing that I observed was ‘The coming up of container shops’, since Jalgaon is a small town, a lot of people’s income depends upon businesses and since the market was completely shut down, people started coming up with container shops right outside their house, work from home was seen in a very different way in a town like Jalgaon when you compare it with urban cities, The other thing that I observed was spatial rearrangement of a vegetable market, where particular space was allocated by the municipality to the vegetable vendors. I took the same space that was occupied by the vegetable vendor and redesigned it.

After making these observations the programs that I wanted to provide for were a jogging track, market space, rental shops, eateries, a place to loiter and sit.

I took the idea of a continuous loop from the path along the lake and the idea of container shops and the idea of a market which became my design syntaxes. The next step was to marry these three different ideas together. The strategy that I came up with was to provide a dynamic loop structure above and the market happens simultaneously beneath the loop with container shops placed at a distance, as the question was also to redesign a typical market and make it covid friendly. The loop also becomes a roof to the container shops. 

Taking the same idea further I came up with the final design. I provided a continuous loop made out of steel and container shops of bricks below which were also acting as a vertical support structure to the loop above. The loop spanned across the road and beneath the market took place beneath which has 10 shops, 2 store rooms and two separate washrooms for men and women.

The loop was made by continuous ramps which also decided the height of the container shops. I provided stairs on the other side so if someone wanted cross the market when it was crowded they could just go from the loop above, the stair could also become place that would be used by the people to sit and gather.