Coalesced Corridor | A Productive Urban Streetscape
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Tags
Public space, Landscape design, Gandhinagar, Productive urbanism, Street design, Street as a place, streetscape, productivity
Author: Riva Shah
Streets are essence of public spaces that weave together and transform diverse urban fabrics. In the city of Gandhinagar, most of its streets are partially developed and utilized for only vehicular purposes. The main function of the streets has shifted from being pertinent public spaces to just a means of reaching places. Therefore this project focuses on transforming one of the urban streets, ‘J- road’ (90m) into an active, social, functional, and productive public space that allows people and as well as wildlife to pause, rest, and interact. Through strategies such as redesigning the ROW and median, introducing multi-utility zones with allotment patches on the street, cycle lanes, and regulations to activate edges, it aims to provide a variety of interventions and anchors that provide incentives to all its stakeholders. Largely, it tries to transmogrify the street from being just a mode to commute from one stop to another into a whole new destination in itself.
The project focuses on redesigning a 90km road (J-road) in Gandhinagar into a more productive landscape with native species, social anchor and more importantly, an active streetscape. It focuses on utilizing the entire R.O.W (90 km) broadening the currently developed ROW of only 35 km.
To understand the existing conditions on road, activity mapping throughout the street was carried out to understand the use of space and ensuring spaces for those activities on the redesigned road in a more safer and productive environment
Through mapping and observations, several issues were identified that were catered to in the design
A vision plan was imagined, with the larger strategy of activating nodes and edges through design by creating incentives that would allow stakeholders to pause and interact. To achieve that three main concepts were derived
Street Development | Design Strategies | Benefits
Sections of the Street | Advantages of the Green and Social Zone
L – scale Plan of the Street
Part Plan | Social Elements | Planting Palette
View 01 – Detailed Design of a Node – As a Formalized Market Space | Smaller views of the MUZ zone with Bio-Swales of Native Species
View 2 – Perspective View of the MUZ Zone and Activated Edge and Inserts for Wildlife in the Median