ACCELERATED URBANISM

(2015)

Navigating Radical Uncertainty: Strategies for Urban Growth at a Break Neck Pace.

The Kalinga Nagar Industrial Zone is the construction site for what will soon be the world’s largest steel processing plant. As such it is tied to global markets and highly sensitive to fluctuations of the world economy. This, coupled with the unpredictable threat of natural disaster from monsoon or earthquakes renders this territory extremely volatile. What we can predict, however, is a massive surge in population from about 10, 000 people to at least one million in the next ten years.ⁱ
Not only does this mean thousands of new houses, but that private sector growth that should include provision for basic urban services such as drinking water, waste collection and houshold plumbing.

In response, the project eschews any totalizing or top down, centralized infrastructure in favor of a decentralized, community engaging network of services. Sensitive to a wider geography, zones for surface water collection and ground water wells are identified at the front end of the fresh water supply chain and zones for reed-beds, anaerobic ponds and infiltration or river discharge are located to treat and manage waste water – the other end of the chain. This line threads through a series of public spaces which manage the provision of fresh water and sewerage on a neighborhood level. Bundled into this ‘thread’ are small-scale facilities for processing organic wasteⁱⁱⁱ, recycling and various institutional or social infrastructural places. This could include an open-air laundry, school, workers’ housing or a farmers’ market. Over time these nodes concentrate urban growth and compete through a highly nuanced and interconnected economy of small enterprises to collect waste, generate energy, supply water and manage waste water. Ultimately those public squares which are most successful will outgrow and outsource the initial services provisions to become soley civic spaces.