Cultural Resilience of Urban Form:
Grishma Nandapurkar | KRVIA – Post Graduate Program | Urban Conservation 2023
Historic Core of Mumbai
Key words : Historic area, Cultural heritage, cultural resilience, temporal resilience, heritage, scales, sustainable re-development, Community participation, interdisciplinary approach
The presence of any historic urban form concludes its constantly evolving systems and adaptive capacities over the years through a diverse term called resilience. These historic urban areas undergo immense rejuvenation or redevelopment pressures of rapid and remunerative development modules compromising the socio- Cultural layers. Identification and understanding of evolved systems and networks of such areas play a major role in questioning the need and approaches to redeveloping historic areas. The thesis analyses the impact and vulnerability within the historic urban areas to define their resilience threshold for development pressures.
The thesis tries to establish the need to Retain, Repair, Reuse or Redevelop historic built forms by categorizing them into high-resilient and low-resilient zones to avoid the homogeneity of urban form in the historic native town of Mumbai. The continued existence of historic urban forms, making them sustainable, allows us to understand their formation and evolution and implement it in new development modules.
For identifying the urban form’s adaptive, transformative and absorptive capacities, the thesis looks at a resilience framework to bring in an interdisciplinary approach for evolving conservation methods suitable for balancing the present economic needs and cultural and historic significance of the place, which will not isolate the heritage but make it part of sustainable development
