Dadar a centrally located neighborhood in Mumbai is the site for study in the fourth year town planning class at D.Y.Patil College of Architecture. As the team walked through the streets of Dadar, mid rise buildings with G+4 Residential apartments abutted by wide side walks were witnessed. The side walks are very human in scale with hawkers serving varieties of food items and making the street active. Side walks are around 3-4 m wide and the buildings directly abut the side walks. Shivaji Park is a popular neighborhood public space in Dadar and covers an area of approximately 25 acres. This is in great contrast to the Central Park at Kharghar which is built on an area of appx. 119 acres. Simultaneously it also presents a reason why Shivaji Park is more habitable than the other.
This size of the space brings the entire park into the cone of vision of the person sitting at one edge of the park thus fitting into the framework of Christopher Alexander's Pattern language. With the absence of huge gates the edge of Shivaji Park encourages visual permeability and helps the users perceive the edge as fluid and transparent. Low level compound walls and wide side walks makes the edge very inviting and safe for people to sit by and relax.
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| Location Map of Dadar |
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| Shivaji Park, Mumbai |
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| Along the pathways of Shivaji Park |
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| Low walls along Shivaji Park forming sitting places |
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| Hawkers along the side walks with a special canopy during rains |
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| Through the bazaars of Dadar |
While the present mid rise housing typology with wide side walks and a successful public space like Shivaji Park makes Dadar a habitable place, with Mumbai being a victim to constant transformation under the neoliberal framework, it is hard to say what the rise in F.S.I will do to this humanized neighborhood of Dadar.
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| Glimpse of Changing FSI in Dadar |
