Simultaneous Stories So Far...
Urban Assemblies: the vacancy Phenomenon
Greenbelt of Ahmedabad
Planning process byproduct

Story so far
City in Space | heenal chavda
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Institutional lands of the city cater to its educational needs. Learning and development occurs through conditional accessibility to the student, staff and teaching community. Over time, the nature of these lands shift and morph to allow for different forms of access. Educational lands have considerable vacant lands that act as semi-public spaces with conditional access. However, conventionally, these institutions often exclude establishments like community centers, or provisions for education of the learning centers for the marginalized communities.
With cities expanding and bursting at its seams, we witness a rapid decline in public spaces for interaction or pause. Vacant lands like these then become spill out parcels with highly contrasting edge conditions with respect to the city. These edges function as highly active territories which overtime get engulfed with planning and developmental schemes like road widening and new regulated activities, the users and the physical space shifts or transforms.
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The institutional vacant land sits vacant to house any future expansion of the institutions but in the meantime, through its edges, accommodates the marginalized communities and passively supports their livelihood. Several of these activities originate from the affordance of institutional edges or its immediate context. It plays a crucial role in defining the city’s idea of public life, of social inclusion and perceptions of accessibility.
Play of permanence?
Existing activities latch onto the site edges operating in regular, seasonal or annual waves – constantly engulfing or releasing the edges while the land itself retains its vacancy for future expansion of the institutes. These edges or margins of these vacant spaces can then be re-imagined as the connecting seams of cohabitation between the marginal and the city.
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