2020_Ankita Teli — SEA Archives

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Highway urbanization: architecture of flux, uncertainty and anticipation

Mobility and Publics
Ankita Teli, 2020

How does a highway reshape the spatiality of a village settlement? This question is framed in the backdrop of an emerging urbanization shaped by the expansion of existing or construction of new highways along India’s inter-city corridors, which intend to reduce travel time for the movement of goods and people, and boost tourism. There are three ways in which existing literature in the urban studies and architecture field discusses such transformations: first, through the dispossession that the land acquisition for such projects lead to and the challenge for collective action; second, the potential of new land based collectives to establish shareholder cities; and third, the possibilities of manifesting vernacular and regional identities in the ongoing architecture through tectonic explorations in architectural design. At stake in my question lies the challenge to open up ways of thinking about transforming spatialities that raise new architectural questions beyond the above discussions.

I explore my research question in Talere village (2,211 population, 2011 Census) located in Kankavli Tehsil of Sindhudurg district along Mumbai-Goa National Highway (NH66), which runs north-south along India’s west coast. Highway expansion here has led to significant socioeconomic and spatial changes, which is also my native place. Given the context of COVID-19 quarantine, I managed to mobilize my kinship networks in the village to locate fifteen households who owned property along the highway and became my field interlocutors. I conducted audio and video interviews with the heads of these households (ten with builtform + five with agricultural land) along the highway to understand the household configurations, livelihoods and spatiality of each property before and after the highway expansion. I drew on Google Earth as well as archival photographs gathered from these households to make architectural drawings. The narrative of the ongoing change is structured as a story of the spatiality before and after highway expansion in a way that combines plans, sections, axonometrics along with rich quantitative and qualitative data that I tapped from the interviews, which has helped me shape three arguments.

First, I argue that the flux of Talere’s urban transition, which has been intensified by the highway expansion, has led to the demand for new programmatic and spatial types of builtform because its highway node is emerging as a night stopover for travelling tourists, and for short and medium term migrants like micro-entrepreneurs selling goods in the weekly market, students, government school teachers and construction workers. This has led to the generation of new programmatic types of builtform in the village such as hotels, shopping centres and rental housing. A single spatial type has emerged in response to these new programmes: single-loaded corridor attached to multiple cells (units) for living or commerce.

Second, the uncertainty of the economic flux has led to each household’s practice of anticipating the future of their property. Household members speculate their futures and for their properties by calculating their individual capacities within the context of the new possibilities opened up by Talere as a highway node, plot location and adjacencies, and ways in which to stake property shares in the joint family household. Although not completely sure of the profits that the anticipated future might bring, households nevertheless invest into building. The emergence of a new single spatial type needs - single-loaded corridor attached to multiple cells - for a diversity of new programmes needs to be understood in the context of such uncertainty and anticipation in the economic flux.

And third, I argue that in the articulation of the new builtform, there has emerged a schism between the exigencies of the fast movement corridor, on the one hand, and the cultural form of existing living practices, on the other hand. This schism manifests in the grafting of the new spatial types into properties that earlier consisted of smaller shop houses, the edges of the new builtform along the highway which neither responds to the fast moving vehicles nor to their use as commons, and even to the construction of new buildings that might drastically reduce or create new opportunities for adjacent properties. This scenario poses new questions for architects who have largely focused on the village as a source of vernacular and regional identities: How can architects design spatialities and buildings that are nimble to adapt to the practices of anticipation in an uncertain economy? What is the architecture of flux and uncertainty?

Read also under ‘Mobility and Publics’:

The spatiality of urban mobilities

Mobility and Publics
Abhinav Pahade, 2020

Street affordance: a case in Amravati

Mobility and Publics
Arnav Mundhada, 2022

The politics of commons

Mobility and Publics
Ashi Chordia, 2020

Upgrading roads: transforming edge affordances

Mobility and Publics
Bharvi Shetye, 2022

City undone: fragmenting the narrative

Mobility and Publics
Maitreyee Rele, 2020

Highway urbanization in Chiplun

Mobility and Publics
Ninad Thatte, 2022

Suburban streets: claims and affordances

Mobility and Publics
Riddhi Shah, 2022

(Inter-)active spaces

Mobility and Publics
Saloni Vora, 2020

From the streets: behaviour and experience

Mobility and Publics
Samruddhi Pawar, 2022

Street as a carnival

Mobility and Publics
Simran Panchal, 2020

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