Honoré van Rijswijk, founder of collective contributed to the international workshop. Defining the urban future for Naya Raipur, the Chhattisgarh State Capital, India.
The Development Authority delivered a city plan dominated by transport corridors. Consequently the new infrastructure facilitates high speed transit and offers sufficient transport capacity. However the plan does not address the human experience of being in the city.
To be successful, a city must be a place of exchange, a place where the experience of people is regarded with the highest value. Above all to allow trading not only of money, goods and services but also the sharing of space, knowledge and ideas. This investigative proposition facilitates and gives room for the personal encounters that characterise Indian life.
We call this intervention, ‘a complementary network’. At the scale of the city the proposed network is a continuous network of streets and open public spaces. It connects the existing villages and planned communities with existing landscape assets, topography, waterbodies, streams and historical routes.
In addition the network needs to provide sufficient space to be able to incorporate informal activities. A set of guidelines will inform the implementation of the complementary network by taking into consideration the spatial components. For example the public spaces, junctions, existing villages and proposed neighbourhoods.
Above all the complementary network will offer the opportunity to evolve and adapt over time and establish social interactions and initiate small scale developments within the new city.