Street Design (Urban Centre Mumbai)

Streets are an essential part of the everyday life of people in the city. They hold life of their own as people inhabit the streets - be it for mobility as they become important transit spaces for pedestrian and vehicular movement; or pausing, as personal spaces are created on the street itself.

We started this course with a discussion around streets and how they afford for life in a city.  We then talked about how a city is thought of by the current mass when words like ‘city,’ ‘urban,’ ‘rural’ and ‘modern cities’ produce a very specific image of them in a simple Google search. What we see in the contemporary street designs is the prioritisation of vehicles over pedestrian movement, when over 50% of all journeys are made on foot, especially in the city of Mumbai. What a city is thought of in a larger view as opposed to what a person walking through it experiences it.

We were divided into five groups to look at different urban typologies in the city: Eksar Talav Edge in Borivali (Area with communities surrounding a waterbody), Kandivali Railway Station, Kandivali (Suburban railway station), Aarey Metro Station, Goregaon (Upcoming metro station areas), Mahakali Caves, Andheri (Heritage site) and City Light Market, Mahim (Markets and surrounding areas).

Starting with taking photographs as a method of documenting the sites, we made ‘streetscapes.’ These produced images were a collage of many pictures stitched together to bring about the essence of the sites and showing the problems and opportunities we identified there. We learnt about SWOT Analysis – a method to analyze the strengths, weakness, opportunities and threats the site has, and the Kevin Lynch Survey – which is a mental mapping method that is generated through the perceived understanding of the place. This simple mapping method gives an overall idea about the context at an urban scale. The survey narrates the space by symbolising various elements of the city through nodes, landmarks, paths, edges and districts. Documenting the site on a plan, we did a Total Station Survey of the area where we recorded the existing conditions to the smallest detail, taking note of every structure, down to the location of drains, manholes, streetlights, water hydrants, bus stops, trees, electric boxes etc. We noted the movement of people and vehicles, existing markets and their patterns and how the stakeholders around interact with the site.

We then learnt about the different methods that can be used to tackle the common problems found in most of the public spaces, procedures that were involved in any project done in a public domain, what is the role of an architect in the process and how the practical and technical aspects of the work is carried on site.

The result of the course was not to produce design plans, but to come up with strategies and guidelines which can be used to improve the street conditions and can be applied to other public spaces as well, and to produce visualisations of how these guidelines contribute to it. All of this was put together in five books, one of each site, which has the complete trajectory of the whole course and projects. 

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