Micro-cities for the inhabitants of India by Alfonso Melero Beviá and Luis Ortiz Martínez

Description of the project by Alfonso Melero Beviá and Luis Ortiz Martínez

1311 million people live in India nowadays. We have passed from 1500 to 7400 million inhabitants on the planet in only one century and the effects of this growth can already be perceived in many situations. In '1311' we portray a future city that does not deny the overpopulated reality that it faces, but rather accepts and tries to coexist with it by remodeling the resource management network. This is not a project of definitive and immovable solutions, but the definition of a system, that is a way of making, thinking and using a series of strategies that allow us to address an increasingly present future. Therefore, this is not a solution, but it is a proposal.

The present city is built as an artificial environment that means a threat to biodiversity, and in which its limited morphology develops limited access to resources. The hierarchization of spaces according to the level of technification contributes to the inefficiency of urban production processes. All this increases urban inequalities. Definitely the present city model cannot and should not grow indefinitely, although it is precisely what is currently demanded with large polycentric cities managed as a single mechanism.

In contrast, the model of adjacent microcities that we present consists of small clusters, autonomous and independent of each other with the only linking of the physical distance that separates them. We try to turn around the concept of city subdivided into sectors to become small settlements, one next to another, autonomous. This model of microcity is reproducible indefinitely.

We take New Delhi as a place of definition of the model, as it is the capital of the next most overpopulated country on the planet. In the adjacent micro-city, the production focal point is the city itself, resources transportation is minimum. Each microcity is self-manageable and it has, against the current linear metabolism model, a cyclical metabolism in which consumption does not result in waste but that feeds back the supply and production line, which will now be a single mechanism.

We highlight three places, within one of these micro-cities, in which the supply process happens, as well as the inevitable social reallocations:

- First, a series of integrated physical processes are carried out along the river. Because of the social and cultural potential of the Yamuna River in Indian culture, the installation of this alternative system contributes to the space empowerment, by giving visibility to processes and restoring obsolete buildings.

- Each microcity needs a community centre that identifies it, in which a large part of the treatments are carried out and from which the pretreated water will be distributed to each of the dwellings, as well as the energy obtained through the digestion of the surplus organic material of the treatment waters, to the streets of the settlement.

- The last treatment is done on the roof of each dwelling. The structures designed for the channeling of water from the central square to the houses, form a three-dimensional public space, which distributes pedestrian traffic and generates more opportunities. The roads are destined to the fast traffic and to the crops, which allows to extract a greater efficiency and communicative speed of the displacements between the microcities.