Meanwhile at Loose Ends. Recoding The City (Fringe Force)

Author:Aaron Desa
Site Location: Mumbai
Institute:Balwant Sheth School of Architecture, NMIMS University
Advisor:Jagdish Jani

Description

The city depends on what it simultaneously destabilizes. While our attention is Forced towards centers, infrastructure and planned development, the urban fringe quietly absorbs the pressures the formal city cannot accommodate. Rather than treating these landscapes as incomplete territories awaiting transformation, the project works with these Loose Ends to understand the fringe as an urban structure that simultaneously absorbs, produces and adapts. It argues that the fringe is not waiting to become the city – it is already a functional part of it. Its intelligence lies not in its buildings, but in the relationships that have evolved through continual negotiation between memory, ecology, economy, users and the city.

From this emerges an Architecture of Force – a design methodology that begins by understanding the systems that already sustain the city before attempting to transform them. Through a relational reading of force imbalances and urban linkages, the project identifies where existing systems become disconnected and where architectural intervention can most effectively recalibrate them. Rather than replacing urban systems, it strengthens existing relationships, balances competing forces and enables incremental adaptation, allowing the city to evolve through what already exists. Equitability emerges not from designing the same solution for everyone, but from enabling different people to participate in & benefit from the relationships that sustain one another.

Tested through Antop Hill in Mumbai, the project argues that architecture must move from designing objects to designing relationships. Instead of measuring architecture by the size of its footprint, it measures it by the reach of the relationships it enables. Each intervention begins with a local condition – work, social, religious, leisure – and recalibrates the networks through which people, places and systems depend upon one another. The architecture remains in Antop Hill, but what it enables extends far beyond it: a piece of cloth woven on the hill appears on a runway in Milan; a flower grown beside a chapel, blooms on a stranger’s balcony; a song performed in a neighborhood Khao Gully inspires a filmmaker; a seed planted in a ruined bungalow becomes part of another city’s landscape. The project asks not how large architecture is, but how far its consequences can travel.