Chandigarh colonies enhancement

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A Densification Strategy for a Livable City Making slums colonies desirable places in Chandigarh By: Amal Wasfi

Introduction As architects we tend to forget that when we form spaces we are contributing to the formation of peoples' life inside these spaces. We think more about buildings' forms than how spaces will be used. We design for users, yet our attention is primarily to form—the envelopes that enclose, rather than the spaces that activate. We disconnect ourselves from the users’ daily life. We may plan building density but we forget about planning for human density and the density of human activities inside and outside buildings' spaces. A lot of urban projects fail due to lack of supporting daily human activities. Not enough consideration is given to how legitimate activities are placed, concentrated and distributed. Unfortunately, according to Jan Jehl, since the time of Le Corbuzier in the 1960s, “planners started laying out cities from the airplane. They would go up in helicopters to get the full site view.” Modern architects followed their lead, so no one “looked after the people scale anymore.” There is a great “void of knowledge” about how to create buildings and public spaces people actually want to inhabit. Starting from this point and inspired by where the author Jane Jacobs left off, this paper address livability (the peoples’ quality of life in the city) and space design. It specifically studies the distribution and the density of buildings, with human and their activities as a strategy for designing livable spaces. Chandigarh colonies are an example of such a fast laid-out master plan, and it is the focus of this research/design project. Chandigarh Colonies Situation The situation at the edges of the city of Chandigarh, drives us to wonder why the slum dwellers in Chandigarh reject moving to modernly built rehabilitation colonies? And why the spaces there are dead of activities? The government of India recently has adopted a building policy of wiping out the slums in Chandigarh and moving the poor to newly built settlements. By spending money, according to the government, all the slums could be wiped out and replaced by a modern one by 2010.


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