Central Vista Redevelopment Project: restructuring the spatiality of Democracy
The Central Vista project is a redevelopment of India’s central administrative area around Raisina hill in New Delhi.
The project is India’s first comprehensively planned intervention in this area, at this scale. It includes changes in
landscape, urban design, demolitions of buildings, reallocation of functions to existing buildings and the construction
of a new parliament building. It is therefore of extreme national significance as it is a restructuring of the spatiality of
the house of Indian Democracy. At a time when multiple indicators suggest that democracy is in decline globally, a
careful examination of the project restructuring the parliament complex of the world's largest democracy becomes
even more pertinent. While there has been much critique of the project on various aspects of its architectural, urban
and planning level decisions, detailed spatial analysis, giving an objective perspective on the project is scarce, if any.
This research intends such an examination of what the spatial (architectural and urban) interventions can tell us
about the imagination of democracy emerging from the design. This study assumes transparency and accessibility to
be indicators of public inclusion and hence essential to democracy. Space syntax methods which are capable of
giving quantitative analysis of such attributes like accessibility and transparency (as visual integration) has therefore
been selected as the set of theories and methods providing the framework for this research. The study will use these
empirical methods to examine the ongoing discourse and its arguments from critics such as Chandravarkar,
Srivathsan and others.
