Handmade Cities - A Toolkit for Urban Villages

Saurav Ashish Chatterjee

UD4006

Handmade Cities explores the transformation of urban villages like Bopal through a rethinking of development regulations. These villages, caught between informality and formal planning, expose critical misalignments in tools like the GDCR. The project reframes regulation not as a constraint but as a design tool, proposing micro-tweaks and a flexible, modular toolkit that enables context-sensitive transformation. By analyzing morphology, testing spatial strategies, and drawing from global precedents, the thesis presents a scalable framework where each village can co-author its own future—through economic, ecological, and social toolkits rooted in ground realities and empowered by regulatory reform.

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Urban villages function as arrival cities for migrants, embodying an urban living with rural ethos.

Poor-quality urban living and signs of decay, highlight a regulatory blind spot—suggesting that strategic tweaks to existing planning codes could better support their transformation and integration into the urban fabric.

A review of global and national housing models shows that no single approach suffices—effective transformation lies in a strategic mix of multiple frameworks.

A toolkit approach—structured as a kit of parts—operates across public, private, and intermediary spaces, enabling the integration of formal planning frameworks with the complexities of informal urban conditions.

Identifying major nodes and social anchors.

Framework plan strengthens connections between nodes and identifies sites for toolkit demonstration.

Existing Vaas and temple precinct shows poor consumption of FSI, access management and ad-hoc extensions to the built. Toolkit densifies the area in a controlled manner, enhancing land use efficiency and public realm.

Toolkit respects and mirrors the incremental nature of these urban villages. Transformed Vaas realises untapped potentials without loosing the essense of traditional living.

Each morphological condition - a lake precinct, a court within a existing vaas or a village crematorium will have its distinct contextual response.

Proposed transformation returns the public space back to people, while deterring encroachments. The idea is to provide a platform for localisation—a scaffold within which each village can assemble its own context-sensitive toolkit, prioritising the themes most urgent to its condition.