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John Baptista Garden in Santacruz East sits as an island - surrounded by dense communities, yet remains largely indifferent to their rhythms. Activity concentrates at the edges while the interior stays underused. The boundary wall acts as a hard divider. When mapped, the edge is full of life while the park interior is the least active space.
This plan is a social mapping of the park boundary, documenting who uses the edges, how they use them, and what problems occur during this. It forms the direct evidential basis for the location of every pocket in the design. The plan overlays four community groups — colour-coded by dot — onto the park perimeter:
● Red dots- Kunchi Karve community
● Purple dots - North Eastern and East Indian community
● Blue dots - Industrial community
● Grey dots -Parents and children during school pickup and drop-off
Problems Identified:
1. High Footfall, Limited Seating — western edge People pass through and linger here in large numbers but have nowhere to pause comfortably.
2. Crowded Intersection
3. Limited Entry Points and Rigid Boundary Wall
4. Engaging in Drinking, Gambling, and Waste Management Issues — south-western edge.
These issues correspond directly to the location of the pockets which are marked in red. Here the boundary wall starts dissolving, producing a series of dents that pull the park into the street and vice versa.
These pockets further develop into semi-enclosed courtyard conditions — small spatial rooms that belong neither entirely to the park nor to the street, but operate as a negotiated in-between. This allows a person to be in an open space without having to formally enter the garden. The edge itself becomes the destination.
Modulating the Boundary Wall, shows how a continuous wall is broken, shifted, folded, and opened to generate the pockets. Some strategies are Scooping — a subtraction from the ground plane that creates a sheltered, semi-sunken condition — and Folding — a surface that bends to simultaneously become floor, wall, and roof.
The built language uses four elemental components — wall, plinth, step, and roof — drawn from familiar spatial conditions around the site, and assembled into light, open structures that support everyday activities without enclosure. The sketches show the relationship between roof, wall, and plinth with the human scale, exploring shade, enclosure, and threshold.
Each programme is placed in direct response to the community or institution it faces, ensuring that the pockets are accessible to the people who need them most.
● Community Hall
● Area for Dance and Sports Workshop
● Classroom
● Library and Waiting Area
● Canteen and Resting Space for Industrial Area
● Workshop Space for Kunchi Karve Community and Viewing Deck
Through this, activity is redistributed from the centre to the edge. The edge shifts from a rigid boundary to a social mediator, becoming a thickened, inhabited zone. The park stops being something you enter and becomes something you are already inside — gradually, from the street. Every pocket acts as a viewing instrument. It frames the park for the street, and the street for the park.
The plinth lifts you slightly above ground, at a threshold that allows you to look at both. The steps choreograph movement and vision together. As you move, the park is gradually revealed — where movement creates sequence and anticipation. The walls act as filters — framing the park through controlled openings rather than exposing it fully, so the landscape is experienced in fragments and continuously reframed.
Library
The pocket at this corner is positioned to absorb and organize the high footprint that it receives — providing a waiting and gathering space that separates pedestrian flow from school pickup activity, giving parents and children a defined place rather than a footpath. The library also acts as an extension of the SHED.
This pocket operates on three levels simultaneously. At the street level, the plinth acts as informal seating for people. The extended roof invites people to gather in clusters. The terrace level, accessed by the wide staircase at the side From here, the view opens in both directions- down to the street, and across into the park interior behind. The staircase is simultaneously a circulation element, and a seating
Anganwadi
The Anganwadi gives a learning space which currently runs out of a small temple which is inadequate in terms of space, it is enclosed enough to feel secure for very young children, but open enough for caregivers to supervise easily. The classroom is flexible-it accommodates a formal teaching arrangement when needed, and shifts into an open space when not in use.
The pocket addresses both by creating a spatial gradient from more enclosed spaces at the lower level to fully open at the upper terrace level. The Anganwadi occupies the lower, more sheltered level; the upper terrace is shared,open, and unprogrammed; these level differences create natural amphitheatres for open air learning.
Canteen
This pocket primarily serves the industrial community that moves along the western edge daily — workers commuting between small scale industries of the neighbourhood. The programme gives a space: somewhere to sit, eat, and rest. The canteen has a counter and a covered ground. It accommodates vendors who currently sell from the footpath without any spatial support. The pocket gives these vendors a fixed counter position, a roof for shade, and a surface to work on. The resting space beside it gives their customers somewhere to sit that is not the footpath edge. the form's openness. It is not a space that belongs to any one community. It belongs to the street.
The counter is positioned along the inner wall — the wall that separates the canteen space from the park interior. This means that when you are at the counter, you are facing the park. The act of buying and eating is oriented toward the garden — the park becomes the view from the canteen, turning a functional stop into a moment of recreation. The seating is not prescribed — the plinth edge, the low walls between the canteen and resting area, and the steps down to the park ground level all become seating surfaces. People sit in the way they choose — facing the street, the park, in groups or alone
Workshop & Viewing deck
This pocket faces the densest and most socially complex edge — the Kunchi Karve settlement, where drinking, loitering, and waste accumulation were the dominant observed behaviours. The programme is deliberately counter-programmatic: rather than a passive or recreational space, this is a space of production. The workshop is oriented toward women and children from the settlement. It provides small, defined rooms for skill-based activities — tailoring, crafts, small-scale food preparation, artisan work. These are not programmes imported from outside - they reflect what women in Kunchi Karve already do in their homes, in constrained conditions, without adequate space, light, or ventilation. The pocket does not introduce a new activity. It gives an existing one a spatial home. This pocket is the most intimate of the project — deliberately so, in response to what women in this community said they need: a space that feels safe. The workshop pocket responds by producing a series of small spatial rooms arranged around a shared open centre.
The courtyard is the organising spatial device — an open centre surrounded on three sides by the rooms, with the fourth side open toward the park. The courtyard is sheltered from the street, visible from the park, and overlooked by the rooms on all sides. It has passive surveillance built into its geometry — someone in any room can see the courtyard, making it a safe space for children when they are not in the anganwadi, for them to play while their mothers work nearby. Each room has its own roof at a slightly different height, The gaps between the roofs allow light to enter.. Each room has a wide opening toward the courtyard so the boundary between inside and outside is always permeable.In the evening, when rooms are not in use, this plinth becomes the gathering surface for the neighbourhood. The upper level is used as a viewing deck during sport activities.
Community Hall
Its programme emerges from a specific observation — that the communities around this park celebrate festivals, perform rituals, and gather for collective events, but currently do so without any dedicated spatial support. Ganpati, Chatt Puja, community meetings, informal performances — all of these happen in the park interior or on the street, improvised and temporary spatial support. The community hall provides a permanent covered ground for these activities. It is large enough to accommodate a gathering of several hundred people, open enough to be used daily for smaller activities -morning yoga, children's play, informal market — and spatially flexible. The hall has no doors meaning it cannot be locked, rented, or privatised which was a concern in the existing. Its publicness is guaranteed by its form. Any community can use it, at any time, without negotiating access.
Sports & Workshop Area
It faces the cricket turf, a BMC-owned ground rented out to private clubs. It houses the office which helps maintain the garden with social leaders of the neighbourhood working alongside BMC, they also help manage the turf, with lockers and changing rooms and space for dance performances, sport activities, yoga workshops etc., giving the form plural use.
John Baptista Garden has the potential to function as a network of micro-institutions embedded in its landscape - not a park with programmes added to it, but a landscape that operates institutionally, supporting learning, childcare, work, and community life as part of daily routine. The park edge becomes a social mediator: a space where different communities, each with their own practices and spatial habits, can find a version of the park that belongs to them while sharing the same ground with other communities. Something that is Not separated - but negotiated, through space. The pockets do not solve the social tensions of this neighborhood or do not try to resolve the history of informal settlements and established communities occupying the same ground. What it does do, is it tries to create the spatial conditions under which those negotiations can happen.
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