Future visions for an Indian city

Master of Architecture (MArch/ RIBA Part 2) students from the Liveable Urbanism studio unit are working with the Mangalore Smart City team to identify future directions of urban development for the Indian city of Mangalore that are liveable, sustainable and smart.

The Liveable Urbanism unit, consisting of 10 students in their 5th year along with the unit leader Dr Shibu Raman, travelled to the southern Indian city of Mangalore in November 2018 to carry out detailed surveys and mapping of the city and its potentials.

Students worked alongside the Mangalore Smart City Limited team, whose objectives compliment the aims of the studio unit, which are to develop evidence-based design proposals that make Mangalore smarter, more liveable, and sustainable.

Dr Shibu Raman, unit leader, said: “We are focusing on some of the aspects that have emerged as key themes in data from Mangalore and the Smart City proposal and through speaking to stakeholders. These include: health and wellbeing, social and economic mobility, efficient and sustainable physical mobility and adopting an environmentally sustainable pathway for development.”

During their stay in Mangalore, the students carried out observation studies on various parts of the city, held public consultations with Mangalorians and met various stakeholders in Mangalore’s urban development such as industry leaders, health professionals, transport infrastructure teams, urban management teams, and real-estate developers. Students also measured and mapped the physical form of the city and its spaces. Through their observations they aim to identify urgent and emerging social, environmental and economic issues facing the city. The students used innovative technologies and approaches they identified or developed in the weeks before travelling to India in order to develop maps and datasets to understand complexities and systems of Indian cities.

In addition to working with the Mangalore Smart City Limited team, the Liveable Urbanism studio unit is also working closely with the Welsh School of Architecture’s partner in India, the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi and their MArch (Urban Deisgn) studio lead by Professor Arunava Dasgupta. The aim of this collaboration is to exchanging ideas and to share data between studio units in Cardiff and Delhi and to give both group of students an international studio experience while the Mangalore Smart City team benefits from the research and ideas that both separate studio units will generate during the course of this academic year.

The Liveable Urbanism unit is supported by the Welsh Government (Divya Hegde and Steve Davis), the District Administation of South Kannada District (Sasikanth Senthil, District Commissioner) and Mangalore Smart City Limited (Mithun Raj) during their study trip and in studio crits.