Encouraging Indigenous Architecture for Sustainable Urban Growth – case of Kolkata

Abstract

Over the last few decades, urban centers have experienced a steady environmental degradation, contributing to an overall lack of comfort in them. Kolkata, a prime urban megalopolis in the Eastern Gangetic plain of India, is no exception to this phenomenon. In today’s city-centric development, urban centres have turned into heat sinks. This rise in temperature is instigating the citizens to use more of mechanical cooling devices, which in turn increase the external temperature by throwing out the inner heat of the building outside, thus creating an endless cycle. Sustainable development approaches of Smart City initiative have recently encouraged planners and architects alike to think and act in order to break this cyclic climatic degradation.

The first part of the paper intends to inspect these critical climatic conditions on a tangible measurable platform, thus establishing the need for a planned intervention into it. This paper then intends to tap a non-conventional solution to the problem. It hypothesizes the comparative supremacy of old indigenous buildings of the existing urban fabric of Kolkata over its newer buildings, and then inspects and tests the hypothesis through climatic measurements carried out in both indigenous and newer buildings.

Analysis and inferences drawn from the climatic measurements would prove the hypothesis to be right or wrong. If the supremacy of indigenous structures is proven, it would then be the onus on the lawmakers to incorporate the unique design inputs of the old buildings into the newer architecture judicially in order to achieve a better thermal performance of the latter.

Keywords

• Indigenous Architecture,Thermal performance,Sustainable Architecture

References

1. [1]. S. Sengupta, “In India, Summer Heat May Soon Be Literally Unbearable”, The New York Times, July 17, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/17/climate/india-heat-wave-summer.html
2. [2]. S. Mitra, “A Methodology to Attain Green Urban Settlements through GIS Mapping” in Journal of Civil Engineering and Environmental Technology (JCEET), Vol 5 Issue 4, April – June 2018, pp. 211 - 214.
3. [3]. Income Distribution:India; http://indpaedia.com/ind/index.php/Income_Distribution:India#2014:_Income_inequality_highest_since_1922
4. [4]. M. Chatterji, “Before Calcutta,” in Calcutta: The Living City, Vol. 1 ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri, Oxford University Press, 1995, Pp. 5.
5. [5]. J. Taylor, J. Lang, The Great House of Calcutta: their Antecedents, Precedents, Splendour and Portents, Niyogi Books, 2016, Pp - 74.
6. [6]. Ibid, Pp – 74.
7. [7]. Ibid, Pp – 75.
8. [8]. Ibid, Pp – 79.

9. [9]. K. Bose, Seeking The Lost Layers: an Inquiry into the Traditional Dwellings of the Urban Elite in North Calcutta, SID Research Cell, School of Interior Design, CEPT University, 2008, Pp - 79.
10. [10]. Ibid, Pp – 2-3.
11. [11]. J. Taylor, J. Lang, The Great House of Calcutta: their Antecedents, Precedents, Splendour and Portents, Niyogi Books, 2016, Pp – 149-153.
12. [12]. J. Lang, M. Desai, M. Desai, Architecture and Independence: the search for Identity – India 1880 to 1980, Oxford University Press, Delhi, 1997
13. [13]. S. Mitra, “A Methodology to Attain Green Urban Settlements through GIS Mapping” in Journal of Civil Engineering and Environmental Technology (JCEET), Vol 5 Issue 4, April – June 2018, pp. 211 - 214.
14. [14]. The Heat Index Equation, National Weather Service, Govt. of USA. https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/html/heatindex_equation.shtml