Project Description: Located at the edge of Delhi, Ghazipur is home to the city’s largest wholesale food markets. Selling vegetables, flowers, poultry, fish and mutton to the rest of the town, these markets directly employ the residences next to them. In the background, however, stands Asia’s tallest landfill, a significant health hazard for the neighbourhood’s residents. Plans to eliminate it have been met with conflicts with the locals whose livelihoods depend on the existence of the landfill.

The proposal aims to turn Ghazipur into a neighbourhood that could independently sustain its occupants during a break in the city’s food supply chain. It also seeks to slowly convert the landfill while at the same time encouraging the gradual social upliftment of the rag pickers community to formalise waste segregation and sorting. This is done in 4 stages, starting from instant solutions such as the erection of walls to prevent landslides of garbage, gradual covering up of the landfill while accommodating the livelihood transfer of the rag-picking community, using the newly available space for civic infrastructure, and finally using up the remainder of the transformed landfill as grazing land to support the dairy industry.