India Developing, but still a long way to go

[Bombaywalla]

Metro Under construction | Bangalore | KA

Vidhana Soudha Station

cc: Source

 

[Bombaywalla]

Metro under construction | Bangalore | KA

Cubbon Park Station

Majestic Interchange

Vidhana Soudha Station

City Market Station

Chickpete Station

cc: Newsletter, originally posted by Maddyvoldy on Skyscrapercity.com

 

[Ryuzaki]

Ahmedabad

 

[Abingdonboy]

Delhi Metro:

 

[Abingdonboy]

New Delhi metro Rolling stock (testing, will enter service soon):

 

[patentneer]

Older Reno Jobs Bombay

(c) Abhishek Behera https://scontent.cdninstagram.com/t51.2885-15/s640x640/sh0.08/e35/12976141_537207309817575_1261522127_n.jpg?ig_cache_key=MTIzMTQ2NDE0Njg4NjU5NzIwMg==.2.l

All New & Renovated Crawford-by-Night, now Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Mandai
- sorry, folks still call it Crawford Market

(c) http://iconosquare.com/sarfaraz1973

How Abha Narain Lambah Restored Some of Mumbai's Crawford Market

Abha Narain Lambah smiles as she recalls an encounter at a recent public event. The architect who specialises in conservation of heritage buildings had not even been speaking particularly about her ongoing project with Mumbai's Mahatma Jyotiba Phule Market, the city's erstwhile central market.

But the 82-year-old man who came up to her had the market, better known by its old name of Crawford Market, in mind. "He told me he had lived in one of those old buildings opposite the market all his life and he had never seen it looking better!" says Lambah. Broken windows have been repaired, wooden balconies restored and the clock tower is now lit up at night giving out an image of renewed health.

And this was only the first phase of the project dealing with the structure's central portion where the two main wings meet. Lambah estimates that it will be at least two years more before her project, which covers the two wings as well, will be done.

Yet even what little has been achieved is surprising and delighting Mumbaikars who had given up hopes for saving the market, which had first opened in 1869. Another compliment came from the city's Police Commissioner whose office is in another heritage building opposite. Lambah says Javed Ahmed, the then Commissioner, joked that they would have to renovate their own building now to keep up with the Market.

Mumbai's police, as it happens, are among the unlikely saviours of the Market. Several years back a well-connected builder made an alarming proposal. This was to keep the front wings and tower - which as heritage structures could not be removed - as facade for a big new building created by demolishing and building over the rest of the plot. Mumbai's builders often create such architectural monstrosities, but the police, realising their HQ could be targeted from the proposed building, firmly nixed the plan.

Lambah's project only got the green-light because, as she says frankly, the interior of the clock-tower would soon have come crashing down anyway. "It had become completely unsafe," she says. The upper floor in the central section were occupied by the municipality's Markets offices, and they finally decided to move out to let the renovation begin.

Heritage conservation has an aura of buildings that are old and quiet, even if falling to pieces. Crawford Market is the opposite. It may no longer be the city's wholesale market, but is still packed with vendors - 688 just in the structure covered by Lambah's project - and in use pretty much round the clock. Many of the people who work in the shops live there, so are sleeping or bathing or eating when the shops are shut, while trucks keep coming up to be unloaded and the produce stashed away.

"The biggest challenge was that we couldn't just evict people as we did the work," says Lambah. The work would have to be done in stages with the shops in the affected areas moving to a set of temporary shops that were built at the far side of the market, and then moving back when that area was done and the shops from the next stage taking their place. It would all require a lot of co-operation from the traders whose business was likely to be affected during their displacement.

This was why the project had pulled off a big success with the tower. "The traders had heard of so many schemes over the years that they were rather cynical about anything really happening," admits Lambah. Restoring the tower was a chance to show that change was possible and, providentially, it involved the least disruption for the traders, most of who were in the side wings. Now with the very visible example of the tower before them, the traders are more ready to move when their time comes.

"In projects like this you have to take all the stakeholders along with you," she says, recalling her earlier work on the signage of the crowded DN Road close by. In that case an association of businesses that worked there appointed Lambah to improve the appearance of the road's mostly heritage buildings. This involved much time spent with the traders along the road, talking and listening and getting them to support the project, but in the end Lambah pulled it off.

Here too listening has helped. "We had thought it would make sense to group all stores of a kind, like dried fruits together, but the traders were clear they didn't want to move from where they were, and we accepted that," says Lambah. Some traders have installed air-conditioners for their tiny shops and while this wasn't exactly in keeping with the Market's atmosphere, the team agreed to allow this. But each trader has now been given their own electrical lines and meters.

The bane of covered markets has always been fire. Stalls are crammed with combustible materials and floors tend to be covered with the dry straw used to pack fruits just waiting for the spark from a faulty electrical connection. And this is not to take into account possibly deliberate attempts like the inferno that conveniently carried off Chennai's Moore Market at just the time when Tamil Nadu's government was casting its eyes at the land it occupied.

Crawford Market itself saw a major fire not long after it opened in 1869. "It seems to have happened in the decade just after, perhaps started by someone smoking a beedi," says Lambah. The restoration after the fire started a process of tinkering with the market that never seems to have stopped. "We never seem able to plan ahead, but just keep making incremental changes - a loft here, some exposed wiring there - all the time," laments Lambah.

In the process the Market's original design, which had an open central garden built around a fountain decorated with statues of river goddesses, was entirely overrun. The fountain still exists - as does another inside the Market - but surrounded by sheds selling fruit and with its top removed to accommodate roofing sheets. "The goddesses have had green blouses painted on them to make them 'modest' - and there is even a note from the painter proudly claiming credit for this!" says Lambah.

Across the world old wholesale markets like Covent Garden in London or Grand Central Market in Los Angeles have been restored in ways that open up their use without entirely gentrifying them out of existence. Cleaning up Crawford Market is bound to raise hopes that something similar could happen there. Even in its current cluttered state, with too many stalls packed with cheap products from China and foods with labels in unreadable languages, it still gets both customers doing their weekly shopping and tourists looking for that busy market buzz.

Judicious reorganisation that replaces the more pointless shops with those more likely to become destination stores, relocation of the sheds and, above all, the closing of the deeply depressing and borderline illegal live animals and pets section, could bring the Market closer to the higher visitor levels and spending of those renewed wholesale markets around the world. Lambah's restoration will provide the setting, but it will be up to the municipality and the Markets traders to fill it with the retail space that this 154 year old structure - and Mumbai - deserves.

(c) http://m.economictimes.com/magazine...bais-crawford-market/articleshow/51849360.cms

Vs.

(c) https://flic.kr/p/vQ9bTg

 

[patentneer]

Reinventing the Indian Railways

| Suresh Prabhu | TEDxGateway
(c) open square bracket_MEDIA=youtube_close square bracket_L2GNUQBBXBM/MEDIA

 

[AbRaj]

Metro Under construction | Bangalore | KA

Vidhana Soudha Station

cc: Source

Single track ???????????

 

[Ryuzaki]

Single track ???????????

the second track would be on the other side of the platform

 

[Peace for Humanity]

Gurgaon

source futuredelhi

 

[Mr.Nair]

India's premier rocket lab manufactured the world's lightest material called silica aerogel or 'blue air.'

http://www.ndtv.com/india-news/isro...-indian-soldiers-warm-in-siachen-snow-1397777

@Bombaywalla @Samudra Manthan @ito @ranjeet @Ryuzaki @Abingdonboy @Bad Guy @punit @dadeechi

Calicut

 

[Mr.Nair]

this city dirty tu much

I can understand your pain.

 

[Abingdonboy]

Reinventing the Indian Railways

| Suresh Prabhu | TEDxGateway
(c) open square bracket_MEDIA=youtube_close square bracket_L2GNUQBBXBM/MEDIA

@anant_s @Levina @PARIKRAMA @ni8mare @cloud_9 @Taygibay @Koovie @Echo_419 @IndoCarib @ranjeet @Parul @Star Wars @Sky lord @Dash @skyisthelimit

 

[Sky lord]

@anant_s @Levina @PARIKRAMA @ni8mare @cloud_9 @Taygibay @Koovie @Echo_419 @IndoCarib @ranjeet @Parul @Star Wars @Sky lord @Dash @skyisthelimit

This guy has vision.

I wish more Indian politicians were like this.

 

[The BrOkEn HeArT]

India overtakes China as top FDI destination https://www.google.co.in/url?sa=t&s...8IGjAA&usg=AFQjCNESh0J38WQ4b5TP4pv2Xb5vg0TgNw