New Delhi:The sense of belonging and ownership by Delhi’s 16 million citizens is what the Yamuna river requires to rekindle its relationship with the city.
This can happen only by riverfront restoration and integration of historic monuments situated along the banks, a research and design initiative of a US university says.
“Re-Centering Delhi” is an initiative of the Univer-sity of Virginia School of Architecture to research the Yamuna river-front and the factors – ecological, social, political and infrastructural – that have led to its current state of neglect.
“We have always taken a clinical, empirical path in projects for cleaning the Yamuna. There has been a lot of clamour around it, but we have neglected the quality of space around the river and how to reuse it to reconnect with the river,” Pankaj Vir Gupta, an architect and visiting professor at University of Virginia, told IANS in an interview at an exhibition and seminar here where the preliminary research findings were unveiled.
The timing of the release is significant as Gupta is confident that given its various initiatives, the Narendra Modi government could be persuaded to look at the final report or at least take up parts of it.
“The new government has a powerful mandate and we thought this was the best time to make these findings public so that if the government wants they can take a cue from various ideas and rejuvenate the Yamuna by proper urban infras-tructure planning,” the Delhi-based Gupta said.
Thus what began as an academic exercise could take on a larger role, Gupta added. The three-year project, which began last January at Gupta’s instance, aims to “re-orient the focus of urban settlements” towards the river, which originates from the lower Himalayas and is the largest tributary of the Ganges. It is a vital resource for the rapidly-growing national capital. It is also known as “dead river”.
Beginning with the monuments and historic centres of the capital, the project considers the current relationship of the city to the floodplain on the west bank of the Yamuna and recognises the efforts to restore the river and the monuments as a “unified catalyst” to create neces-sary public infra-structure for the city.
“The Red Fort, Purana Qila, and Humayun’s Tomb were built with their walls directly beside the Yamuna,” the report says.
“It was very important to re-look at the early model and the flow of the river, design and architecture, to propose something that is relevant,” said Gupta
The project began with a team of students and faculty visiting the capital to analyse and reconstruct how rapid urbanisation, coupled with the absence of planning strategies along the Yamuna, has resulted in an ecological emergency for the city.(IANS)
