Shah Pooja Chirag

UR3001

Joy of Walking

Driving home from work after a very long day, you thought to yourself, “what a beautiful evening, let's go for a walk”. So now here you are, trying to dodge the electricity boxes and the two wheelers that have stolen your space. Your day gets worse, you can’t walk straight, it's a bad dance. And the music? It’s that horrifying truck that just passed you by. You smell it too don’t you? The diesel from its engine that polluted the entire road’s atmosphere. Frustrating, right? Being controlled in something as basic as walking? 
But wait, you entered a rather empty looking patch of land to run away from the smell, and are in a total shock. It's amazing, it's so much better, there are no motorized killers or their stink to make you run on your walk. You hear the birds, you see the trees and a little bit of faded light of the sunset piercing through the leaves. You can feel the vastness of the space with the soft evening breeze on your skin. The breeze is bringing the fragrance of a hidden flower patch at the end of the plot. And when you get there, all those colors hit your eyes and it is almost overwhelming how happy you feel. 
You continue to walk across and reach out on the road again, with that truck smell. You forgot it was in the middle of that chaos, didn’t you? That’s the true magic we need to harness and understand what exactly is setting the scene for the overall experience of walking. The elements that soothe our brain and help us look at walking in a city with a completely different angle and experience the actual delight of walking. 

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What walking in a city looks like

Different types of sensory experiences explored

Elements considered while choosing the paths and Categories of trails

What walking in a city can actually look like, by using the existing nature of these vacant lands

All the sites selected over the city provide a different experiential quality

Pilot site- Parimal to Ravivari Trail

Pilot site- Vastrapur to ATIRA Trail

Pilot site- Vasna Barrage Dam to Miyawaki Plantation Trail

Sarkhej-Makarba Trail

Kit of Parts to build a new trail