Ahmedabad POPS

In this course, CEPT students joined Kingston University students of Landscape Urbanism and their faculty to look at the articulation of Public Space in Ahmedabad. Together they tracked Ahmedabad’s Privately Owned Public Spaces, (like informally used vacant lands for cricket grounds or corporate sponsored parks) Gated Public Spaces, (most municipal parks!) and Gated Community Spaces (found in societies, and in pols). They tackled issues of ownership, opening times, and access of different users to the space, for different types of activity, focusing on how they can relate these aspects to urban design and its elements.

Urban field research was supported by a seminar on culturally situated mapmaking. Taking at a point of departure the Bufalini (1551) and Nolli (1748) Maps of Rome, which diagrammatically differentiate public and private urban space, they extended this lineage to the time-based and nuanced urban analysis of Saverio Muratori’s 1960 “Studi per una operante storia urbana di Venezia”, to Aldo Rossi’s seminal 1972 map of Zürich, Switzerland, and to further maps that shape and represent ways of thinking and understanding about cities and public space. They productively juxtaposed this lineage with Indian urbanism to augment our urban toolkit.

Led by: Melissa Smith, Christoph Lueder, Inigo Cornago Bonal, Bulbul Vyas

Students (CEPT University):

Ahzam Mohammad Quraishi

Akash Ghadiyali

Anju Janardhanan

Bhargav Pandit
George Verghese

Ishita Saxena
Pooja V Hindocha
Rakhshan . Khan

Sanket Prakashchandra Rana
Steven Solomon Canara
Vidit Kundu

Students (Kingston University):

Iuliia Filippova

Kristian Whittaker

Liliam Elena Alvarez-Medina