"the street" : a veritable market place : tapasi mittal

The Market place/Bazaar is considered in urban studies as one of the most significant socio-spatial systems in cities. This Thesis explores the meaning and significance of Markets as a positive integrator of the community in the urban fabric. The market place, which is an “Urban Catalyst”, houses a complex system which is indicative of a city and its prevailing social/economical/cultural climate. The market place is the city in microcosm.

The traditional bazaars and market streets maintained a quality of conviviality and spatial order, where people congregated to enjoy the aspects of everyday life. Present day society seems to have moved away from this idea of human thriving in the street, where the “thrills of the bazaar are traded in for the conveniences of sterile supermarkets,” which erases the sensuous feeling and rhythmic diversity of being the street. Sorkin regards this as the emergence of a new kind of city, a “city without a place attached to it”, where a disaggregated patchwork of fabric forms a bland, senseless urban environment.

To be able to explore architecturally the possibilities of infusing a ‘Bazaar’ like spatial quality to a cities existing sterile commercial zone is my core subject of interest. Also market places do not function solely as commercial zones but plug into the urban fabric on multiple levels which leads to the architectural complexities within cities. The Bazaar forms the life line of continuity in the city, enriched with activity, forming a tapestry of spaces linked together.

“The urge to make separations, between clean and dirty, ordered and disordered, ‘us and them’, that is to expel and abject, is encouraged in western cultures, creating feelings of anxiety because such separations can never be finally achieved.”

(D. Sibley, Geographies of exclusion)

This being said, for me the public/private interface holds the most credence particularly in the case of a ‘Bazaar’ where the public and private tend to overlap in complete harmony. Also addressing the concept of the built and the unbuilt or building/landscape juxtaposition is necessary in the design process and hence ‘the street’ being the perfect testing ground for sighting a project of this nature. The design may express itself at the macro level as a transformative organizational sequence, which then at the micro scale plugs in to the overall scheme as episodic suggestions. These interventions need not necessarily be formally programmed, but are open to the ad-hoc use associated with the vernacular of the street. The intent of using Maya hair dynamics as a digital tool is to be able to develop a prototypical, computational module which when deployed on different environments will ideally generate site specific, strikingly unique set of design parameters.