Plaza Estacional, Caracas. Gabriel Visconti Stopello AGA estudio. Fotografía: José Bastidas.. Image Cortesía de Jeannette Sordi
Throughout the world's cities, in the midst of current and projected crises-- environmental, health, economic, and otherwise--one question looms: How can we prepare our urban centers' most vulnerable sectors?
Current data paints a bleak picture of cities and the impact of climate change. With urban populations skyrocketing as people around the globe seek opportunities for a better life in the world's urban centers, cities have become gluttons for energy and other resources while simultaneously producing more emissions than ever before. On top of this, 3 out of 5 cities are at high risk for natural disasters.
How long-term should urban planning be? Munich’s Oktoberfest, the Kumbh Mela pilgrimage in India (or the largest gathering of humans on the planet), the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, and other major events demonstrate that flexible architectural configurations are temporarily deployed around the globe to provide medium-term shelter, often to enormous crowds. Such structures fulfill a range of functional tasks and are used in religious and cultural festivals or can take the form of military camps, refugee camps, or even temporary mining towns. This show traces a global phenomenon that has become increasingly topical given today’s current state of mass migration triggered by climate change, political strife, and natural disasters.
Kumbh Mela, January 2013: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City. A project by Harvard University. Published by Hatje Cantz. Image Courtesy of Felipe Vera
As the location of the world's largest single-purpose gathering of people, the 2013 Kumbh Mela obviously required a significant organizational effort from those charged with planning it - but what is less obvious is exactly how this need to plan can be squared with the nature of the Kumbh Mela itself. Located in the floodplain of the river Ganges, most of the 23.5-square-kilometer area of the festival (commonly referred to as the nagri) remains underwater until a few months before the festival, and organization is at every stage challenged by the uncertainty and ephemerality of the festival itself. In this excerpt from the recently published book, "Kumbh Mela, January 2013: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City," Rahul Mehrotra, Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design at the Harvard GSD, and Felipe Vera, Co-director of the Center for Ecology, Landscape and Urbanism at UAI DesignLab, explain how infrastructure and street grids are deployed in a way that not only enables the Kumbh Mela festival itself, but enhances its ephemeral and democratic spirit.
Deployment Process
Standing at the Kumbh Mela at night looking towards an endless functioning city where the temporary construction of the nagri is fused with the city of Allahabad, there are two things that one cannot avoid asking: 1) How was this enormous city planned in terms of scale and complexity? 2) How is the city actually constructed? One of the most interesting elements about the construction process of the city is that unlike more static and permanent cities—where the whole is comprised of the aggregations of smaller parts, constructed in different moments that are tied together by pre-existing and connecting urban infrastructure—the city of the Kumbh Mela is planned and built all at once, as a unitary effort.
https://www.archdaily.com/624425/kumbh-mela-designing-the-world-s-largest-gathering-of-peopleRahul Mehrotra & Felipe Vera
