Encouraging Indigenous Architecture for Sustainable Urban Growth – case of Kolkata

Year 2019, Volume: 3 Issue: 1, 1 - 10, 15.05.2019

Sanmarga Mitra

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

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