Mani Chauhan

UR3001

Rahat : the urban coolers

Vacant lands are the city’s undefined, calm and forgettable space. Such lands need to be reimagined when the city is facing chronic stress. In Ahmedabad, 11 million people are at a high risk of living on an urban heat island. The most impacted people are vulnerable groups like vendors, slum dwellers, pedestrians, daily wage labourers, delivery men, auto-rickshaw drivers, traffic police and construction workers. Therefore, there is a need of an intervention which can provide a relief space for such vulnerable groups in various scales of vacant land around the city.Using simple techniques of evaporative cooling, shading and providing heat stroke kits can help people to sustain themselves during heat alerts. The intervention aims to provide a relief space every 200 meters in the city, so that it can create an overall impact on the microclimate of the neighborhood. 

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Understanding Vacancy: how the vacant lands appear and pop out in the midst of various built contexts in a city.

Manifesto: An intervention which will bridge the gap between unforeseen circumstances and capacity constraints in the city.

Understating heat waves and its impact on the city.

Relationship between vacant lands and vulnerable groups in relation to heat action plan.

6 typical sites: different scale, different vulnerable group, different orientation and different function, different intervention .

Cooling Elements

Possible interventions: the flexibility and temporary nature of the design makes it exponentially expandable during heat alerts.

Intervention placed on various scale of the vacant land across the city.

Locating intervention and their type based on the context of vacant lands and location vulnerable groups.

Visualization of a neighborhood with multiple 'rahat' urban relief space.