Post urban spectacle city: the urban design case for retrofitting the CWG infrastructure in New Delhi

Abstract

When a large scale urban spectacle is held in a city, the city adapts and remolds itself to fulfill the needs of the event. Various additions are made to the city fabric. After the event is over, the people leave but these temporary and permanent structures stay back in the city. They get used in different ways by the city and at times is abandoned. Similar situation happened in Delhi, during Common Wealth Games (CWG) in year 2010. It was the largest international multi-sport event to be staged in Delhi and India. Thus many structures and infrastructure were added to the city, to support the games. Some of the additions to the fabric of city include · A four-lane flyway, Barapullah elevated road, constructed to reduced travelling time to six minutes. · To support mass transport, nine corridors were constructed as High Capacity Bus Systems · The Delhi Metro was expanded. The metro has extended to Gurgaon and the Noida area. · Indira Gandhi International Airport was modernized, expanded, and upgraded. The airport was connected to the city via a six-lane expressway (Delhi–Gurgaon Expressway) and Delhi Airport Metro Express line. · New venues were built and old were renovated. Area of concern The thesis talks about the infrastructure created during this spectacle in the city. During the games an ad-hoc addition was made over barapullah drain, named barapullah elevated road, a four-lane flyway of 4.5 km length, linking the Games Village to the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium. The addition of this infrastructure led to issues like creation of junk spaces, residual spaces and spatial and pyhsical fragmentation in city. Thesis Intent The thesis will be dealing with issue of creation of junk spaces, residual spaces and spatial and physical fragmentation caused by the Elevated barapullah link, and to retrofit this ad-hoc object into city system through urban design.