Narrative Flows Studio + Seminar

Throughout our rapidly urbanizing world, cities are of challenged by the future promise of too little, too degraded, or too much water for their continuously expanding populations. This course focuses on one of the world’s great megacities and the third largest city in India – Kolkata (Calcutta) – at the western edge of the Bengal Delta, and asks how we should honor, conserve and wisely use this vital natural resource when creating sustainable urban lifestyles for the 21st Century. 

Coupled with the Narrative Flows seminar, and supported by the Design for Development graduate seminar, the course explores the role of water in the Bengal people’s sense of self as expressed in their rich literature/poetic traditions, their art and worship, and their architecture and land management traditions. 

Within Kolkata the focus will be the Kalighat neighborhood lying adjacent to the Tolly’s Nullah (Adi Ganga), the canal following the original course of the local branch of the Ganges (Ganga). Known as one of the city’s poorer, but most industrious, neighborhoods, Kalighat, lying at the historic convergence of the city’s religious, hydrologic and social networks, offers a rich opportunity to propose a strategic and surgical realignment of urban and ecological infrastructures to support the well-being and future of the entire urban community.

The program for the studio is the design of a new tourism retreat and community center along the canal which will be own and operated by a neighborhood cooperative. The facility, while offering a rich urban ecocultural experience for travelers visiting the city, or passing through on their way to the Sundarbans, Bhutan or Nepal, will offer the local community opportunities for self employment, a training institute focused on entrepreneurship, business management skills, sustainable building practices and materials, water management practices, and urban agriculture; a literacy program and written local histories archive; and an incubator for new spin-off business in furniture production, textiles and ceramics using local or recycled materials. Moreover, the retreat and community center will offer models of sustainable urban living in that, where ever possible, the facility’s food, energy water and waste will be produced, managed, and re-used on site.