2022_Sneha Rathod — SEA Archives

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Rural metamorphosis

Hybrids and Cohabitation
Sneha Rathod, 2022

Trekking is a sport a person opts not only for the adventure but also to experience the rural culture, the lifestyle of people with a dash of activities along the trail and at the base. Being a part of this industry, I myself have been through alot of trekking spots, but also being an architecture student, I have had a keen observation over the landscape, the builtforms and the inhabitation the base villages hold. Strolling along a few villages I found one thing very similar in all of the spots that made me question about the already existing fabric vs how it has been changing in the past few years.

Things tend to change when there is an external intervention providing opportunities for it to change. And that happened in one of the villages in Panvel. The village prabalmachi is a small settlement on the plateau which stands at the foothills of two peaks, kalavantin durg and prabalgad fort. Tourism industry flourished here somewhere around 2-3 decades back and it has also been proven to be providing economic opportunities here. Thus it brought along major changes in this village such as the shift of economy from agrarian to tourism based, the growth in infrastructure and the change in its spatial nature.

The thesis revolves around how this intervention of the tourism industry into rural settings changed its landscape and its inhabitation. So while addressing this question, I drew a diagrammatic loop or a cycle happening here which has its end broken at a point.

Under the impression of growing economic opportunities and attracting a huge amount of people to visit here, the villagers started to organise various trekking events and activities leaving behind all the practices they used to do for the living. This definitely worked initially the way they aimed it to be, and with time there began an influx of people which gave rise to over tourism and overcrowding. To curb this dilemma, the best solution the villagers could find was to increase the infrastructure and alter its spatiality in order to accommodate the people coming in. This gave rise to the extension of spaces, the change in practices, the vanishing of the landscape and the growth in infrastructure which in whole changed the entire experience one expected to come here for, in the first place. This has largely created a gap between humans and nature. I might ask the question, what do people come to these spots for, apart from adventure? I myself being a part of the industry, expect to go and celebrate nature and experience the rural lifestyle, but what I ended up experiencing was the same thing that I was finding an escape from, the regular monotonous lifestyle inside our small cubicles in this concrete jungle. Their infrastructure has grown to be replicating the spaces we have in our city, which brought along with it the complex spatial nature increasing the discomfort. This has been coming up under the impression that it is what the people coming from the city expect, but I'm afraid that's not the case. The hospitality they are trying to provide is a mere assumption based on our expectations which are not even true.

This held a firm base of my studies wherein I've focused on the urban transition happening here and what might be their repercussions if done in excess. And to address this I have studied various transforming buildforms such as a stall along the route, the entire village and a house turned hotel (the pioneer and the founder) inside the village in terms of its changing landscape, the spatialities and the practices.

Through this study I found various issues and gaps between the perception and experience of the space and what is being offered now. The altering in spatiality, materiality and form has altered the experience of the space and the relationship with the nature which might result into the collapse of the loop or a cycle that once formed due to the tourism intervention and this broken end is exactly what may cause them the irreversible damages proving to be antithetical to the sustenance of their business and the economic source.

This thesis might be helpful in understanding the spatial nature of a rural setting and how it shall be improvised to incorporate an external intervention without causing irreversible damages or losing its spatial relationship with nature and experience.

Read also under ‘Mobility and Publics’:

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The politics of commons

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Upgrading roads: transforming edge affordances

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City undone: fragmenting the narrative

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Highway urbanization in Chiplun

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Suburban streets: claims and affordances

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Riddhi Shah, 2022

(Inter-)active spaces

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Saloni Vora, 2020

From the streets: behaviour and experience

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Samruddhi Pawar, 2022

Street as a carnival

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Simran Panchal, 2020

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