Vandiyur Lakefront Development- An Urban Intervention – Hashtag Urbanism

etcetera, etcetera and etcetera. 

City centre of Madurai, a sterilised urban form, on the river banks of Vaigai, is defined by its streets that were constructed with a yardstick that fits exactly a bullock cart. Don’t even get me started on the current tensions of violation that are in mutiny against the statutory.

Statutory is order, statutory is harmony, statutory is a win-win, so is money.

Imagine a landowner expecting the most out of her holding in the Central Madurai (Oh come on, I am not going to call it a CBD, like how Phoebe can’t call this girl ‘Precious’ by name) is restricted to develop her property with no adequate return. Expecting her to correlate with the neighbours when development trend is shifting to the northern part of the city is just not progressive.

The temple tower has laid its strong territorial essence, like a tiger urinating around and this has put moral and fundamentalist discourses on the planning department’s meeting table. This needs a sort of strong, absurd approach to be taken in hand, for which I don’t have the energy and guts yet. God bless me. Driving around or through the city is an hour-long safari that offers smoke bomb ventures, dust storm sequences and a horrible composition with the honking mafia, not to mention the quest for parking. Its a sojourn of insanity.

Then suddenly the city becomes a playground of millions and festive enough to host high energy human flow (Festivals), where nobody who lives inside the city centre can rush to the hospital to deliver a baby or treat a heart attack (just in case). The editor can remove this part from the text but it is clear how much of a rigorous hypocrite one gets in an act utilitarian debate.

It is temporal yet rigid, dystopian yet colourful. Informality in Indian cities is inevitable, crammed into our wallets right next to that compulsory Aadhar card (the Indian Identity card). This entourage is lively, addictive, giving a sense of home even if you don’t have one inside the city. Unlike the downtowns of global cities, it is not a settlement near hyper economic plug like ports.

Instead, it is a sacred city model tied to a blank box by a heavy dosage of the human thesis.
A successful economic model that lies in an antique section of the museum that the museum keeper forgot to dust; one that even the antique patrons skip.
It is a potential work-live footprint model.

The temple generated economy, the economy generated place, place generated transactions, transactions generated attachment, attachment generated meaning and value- all of which come with a blindside, like the Rs 99 added to every Bata shoe to hoodwink your analytical thinking. 

Literality is absurd but powerful. Literality questions our basic understanding, driven by fundamentalism but in a fetish, obsessive way. Fear no abrasion, the ancient builders of this city never did. The centrality is moving, neighbourhoods are addressed with institutions, development projects to tackle density are rising the skylines of the town edges like the fort walls. Global, grand, ground floor supermarkets that are distinctly different from the old, small-scale economic models are becoming the magnets that generate and dictate attention in the real estate market. The financial institutions and banks are confused, uncertain with the market trend and interest values that have sustained because of the one thing- the lack of legible urban form. Okay, this might be an unfair speculation because theoretically, one can actually draw the definitive form of this city on a piece of paper. It’s a Concentric grid. Not many cities in the state of Tamil Nadu can afford this kind of recognition to its lives. The question is, what happens to the rest of the city? Should all cities have a definitive urban form? Not exactly. No.

Look at the way urban form was manipulated to yield the best economic model, once Central Madurai became over saturated. The flow of economy was well practised and accentuated with a peripheral market at the edge of the grid. This city knew how to work with its legible form. In recent years the local markets (fruit, flower, and vegetable) were moved to the functional edge of the city in proximity to a State bus transit station- the drifting centrality. Central Madurai is still putting up with its new capitalistic ventures with hospitality and retail industry. Now, this will make Central Madurai a probable Central Business District given that a considerable amount of office spaces form around it. Fortunately, by the virtue of Central Madurai’s rigid form, it cannot host such iterations. As a result, the edge of the city is slowly playing host to all the rejects of Central Madurai, like the relocated local markets, bus transit station, the new Information Technology parks, etc, which might boost the real estate market of this area.

Geographically how and where is this all happening? Yes, I heard you. Around the Vandiyur Tank which has a history of encroachment both by the state and the public where the economical and political motives are evident. There is an opportunity to open a dialogue about the urban form and its legibility again for this Insomniac city. This time we respond with ecology as our basic concern, by dressing the context of the edges, through acknowledging the technological model and its ultimate economic model-the Neo-liberalised setting. The Arctic is melting. The Bore well drillers are creating new records every day around the tank. Temple bells are ringing, in an electric sound system, probably bought and shipped through Amazon. 

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This article is a prologue of Siva Subramanian’s undergraduate design thesis, ‘Vandiyur Lakefront Development- Madurai’, that addresses the drifting centrality of Madurai Metropolis through a legible urban framework and ecological urbanism.

Noteworthy Mention:  The author was invited to present this thesis for the International Symposium on “Urbanisation, Ecology and Community Development” Curated by GSAPP, Columbia University, NewYork and Thiagarajar College of Engineering in August 2016, since it is the ongoing discourse for a potential future of Madurai. This project was also shortlisted for Archiprix 2017 and was exhibited during the Archiprix Convention at CEPT, Ahmedabad.

 https://issuu.com/hashtagurbanism/docs/vandiyur_lakefront_development_hu