Urban Scar to Social Commons: A Heritage Museum for the Cashew Legacy, Culture, and Community of Kollam

Author: Manu Viswam E
Site Location: Kollam
Institute: College of Architecture, Trivandrum
Advisor: Prof. Sreeram Ramesh

Description

The collapse of Kollam’s global cashew trade left behind more than derelict infrastructure. It fractured the socio-economic identity of a city built on this industry. This proposal transforms a historic industrial zone, the historic Harrisons & Crosfield factory, along the Kollam waterfront into a civic bridge: reclaiming land once closed off by industry and returning it to the public as democratic, shared ground.

Rather than a static repository of artifacts, the museum operates as an active urban threshold honouring the working-class legacy of cashew labourers while rehabilitating the ecological edge and anchoring Kollam’s future to its maritime heritage. The strategy of “selective preservation and radical insertion” retains the memory of the industrial grid while breaking it open for pedestrian permeability, sinking and elevating programs to free the ground plane for public movement, planting, and gathering.

Equitability drives the design: livelihood training for women workers, a shaded civic edge for fishermen, learning spaces for students and youth, and heritage made accessible to visitors — without displacing local life. Heritage here becomes working infrastructure, not an object for viewing.