Creating an urban interface between cantonment and the city: a case of Jhansi

Abstract

The history of the cantonments in India has revealed that the cantonments were originally located outside cities and away from the civilians. But as the cities started to expand, they began to grow around the existing cantonment. Thus, due to rapidly increasing urban population, cantonment over time ended up being located within cities. However, since the land remains in control with the government; entry into them remained relatively restricted to non-military civilians. Thus, cantonments ended up becoming oases of space and greenery in an increasingly crowded city. So, the edges around this oasis somehow, remain neglected and an urban interface is missing between the cantonment and the city. Thus, to cope up with the development happening in the city and to merge this difference, an urban interface needs to be created between the cantonment and the city. The Cantonments in India were established along the main routes of the country, at strategic locations, generally subsumed under the phrase ‘colonial urban development’. The Cantonment’s structure can be termed as ‘Dual-city’ or a town beside a town as cantonments were meant to be self-sufficient, having their own cultural, social and functional areas. The aim of this study is to integrate the cantonment with the surroundings by creating an urban interface between them. Based on the characteristics of the internal spatio-functional organization of cantonment towns, two different types of morphological-functional sub areas can be observed namely, Military area and Civil area. In 1948, SK Patil as the head of a committee recommended that large areas of cantonments should be merged with local Municipal Corporations. So, 18 cantonments were identified whose partial civilian areas were supposed to be excised. The centre has agreed to make changes in the existing rules and regulations in the cantonment areas starting from building bye-laws to increasing floor area ratio (FAR) on Indian Army lands for ‘modernisation and democratisation’. Jhansi has been chosen for this study as Jhansi has one of the oldest cantonments and its cantonment has been identified as a cantonment that can open their civil lands for Municipal authorities to develop. Jhansi, a historic Indian city of south-western Uttar Pradesh state, lies in the western part of the Bundelkhand region on the banks of Pahuj River at an average elevation of 285 metres. Jhansi has a Category II Cantonment established in the year 1842. The area of the delineated site is 26 sq.km. The thesis tries to understand the topic by looking from different dimensions, from city level studies such as the study of city level public and semi-public spaces, Master plan proposals and city level actual land value to introducing the potential areas within the area of study through various layers of ownership, landuse, informality, building use, figure ground and detailing of the civil areas. The design proposals attempt to integrate the city and cantonment in visually, culturally and socio-spatially. These proposals will all together create an integrated urban interface which reflects the characteristics of both the entities.