Mess is More

The architectural discipline has always maintained a safe distance from the ‘informal’ settlements by positioning itself as objective outsiders. However, in the case of India’s capital city of Delhi with 73% of its population living in these settlements, the discipline has been forced to re-position itself. Forming outside the claims of regulation and planning, the sheer existence of these settlements challenges the city’s aspiration to become a ‘world city’. Resultant, is a love-hate dynamic where a high-modernist design propaganda seeks to evict the urban poor’s position in the city to a ‘safe’ distance where they are out of sight but in the appropriate range to aid the city function.

I base my study in ‘Anand Parbat’,a deplorable resettlement transit neighbourhood developed 4 miles from the city core to re-house slum dwellers evicted from inner city areas. Envisioned as a transition camp, it is home to more than 2000 families. The design of the ‘camp’, involved a process of ‘formalizing’ the informal and invited disciplinarian aid, which by the virtue of ‘always being outside the system’ was exceedingly limited in the understanding and translational of the emergent qualities of a user-generated informal dwelling. With rigid dwelling typologies, unregulated open/shared space structure and an incoherent application of ‘incrementality’, Anand Parbat is an architectural mess.

This thesis attempts an iteration to existing approaches by offering an alternative housing scheme. It learns from the contextual informality and rationalises the learnings for a disciplinarian application. It uses infrastructure as invisible layers as the backbone of the dwelling layout and reimagines domestic space for rendering progressive and high-spirited families. By the means of economics, proactive policies and careful design decisions it lays out an itertive and nuanced masterplan scheme that beneath its surface offers various spatial characteristics of an informal settlement from Delhi. The project peaks at building and surface material innovation where to make the dwellings cost effective a brick is modelled out of kitchen waste found commonly in Indian urban poor kitchens. A large variety of colors and sizes are innovated to give the settlement an aesthetical character. Various cost effective techniques are used to involve inhabitants into small-scale buidling processes. The project is rationalised for a widespread application in New Delhi, fully capable to absorb and embody contextual characters - geographic, cultural and economical. The project is also visualised for projective iterations and scenarios that would be cast by its inhabitants to highlight the performance of the design decisions in time.