George Verghese

UR2008

Liquid city is an attempt to be imaginative about speculative conditions situated across scales and their relationships as an urban system. Partly the focus was purely draw/visually communicate speculation on current condition, future and an alternate theory. It is not an attempt to resolve a problem but to look at the system. The drawings aim is to begin a discourse on how we have developed our current systems and to make bold moves towards sustainable and equitable futures. The three sets of drawings portraits my personal views from the learnings over the past four months. Process on asking what, why and how guided the path towards these speculative situations. The conditions do not adhere to political boundaries but on linked systems such as, Narmada and its relation to Sardar Patel statue all the way to Ahmedabad. The location chosen here are at different points in the life cycle of the system, beginning at Sardar Sarovar dam, the water then carried by Canal, not before pumping water at the foot of Statue of Unity, moving further along are farmlands which either receive little or no water whatsoever from the canal as promised. Though the infrastructure exists more often than not they are dysfunctional, at the end towards downstream an accumulated amount of effluents collected from the several industrial belts in the region all land up in the Arabian sea. The base layer with the building footprint is the map of Ahmedabad, with Sabarmati river front creates a questionable sustainable future. “We need to view the fragility of the planet and its resources as an opportunity for speculative design innovations rather than as a form for technical legitimation for promoting conventional solutions. By extension, the problems confronting our cities and regions would then become opportunities to define a new approach” - Mohsen Mostafavi, Ecological Urbanism