Mass Migrant Housing in the Indian Context
by @isha_bafna for @4×3.m
The focus our site in Surat, Gujarat was the migrant community located in the Nehrunagar neighborhood. We talked to a lot of families that have come there from Maharashtra. These people have personalized this space and our analysis involved understanding the space requirements and occupancy of these families.
My site had an organized housing structure, the only one on the site, which had provided a sky corridor at the G+2 level. This space was used as an extra aangan and worked very differently from the open spaces on the ground floor. A first floor plan as shown in the fourth image demonstrates the orientation of the units and the circulation around the building. This was an exceptional design that made even the cramped up houses seem airy and functional to the people and went on to facilitate chance encounters between the people on the site. These chance encounters made the spaces truly public in nature.
After the site observations, we moved on to site analysis. In this part, we made inferences from the drawings we had made to try and figure out our focus areas based on the community’s requirements.
Post the inferences, once we had our core concept and focus areas established, we moved on to look at methods of achieving those concepts through experimenting with massing. Firstly, we determined the size of the units, and their composition. It became important for me to align the services of each unit so that played a major role in determining my stacking. Similarly various other factors like courtyard formations and shadow analysis, as identified during the analysis and inferences informed the linking pattern.
The final design outcome had step terraces, common corridors and courtyard space creation on each level as the focal design concept. According to my understanding of the site and the community, I felt these spaces not only provided for accessible and safe community gathering spaces but for the women of the site they essentially became spill over spaces to promote a live-work environment.
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