Ayodhya City Extension

Uttar Pradesh, Ayodhya, India

Year: 2020

Planning/Urban Design

The Ayodhya city extension was a masterplanning project. The project brief demanded a relook at the earlier proposed city plan to the extension of the city of Ayodhya located in Uttar Pradesh in northern India. The site which had an area of 1407 acres was located along the Saryu river. The proposed masterplan engaged with a couple of issues which an older proposal seemed to miss hence we believed needed reassessment. Issues concerning the existing settlements and their incorporation. Issues regarding how a city built on the edge of a river could be developed and the kind of landscape it should have keeping in mind the climate crisis, especially flood mitigation. The plan also looked at how land use could be developed to enable not only an economy of tourism but of institutions. This along with a key question of grain size, which we believe is essential to making cities conducive to co-inhabitation.

The site had an existing embankment along the edge of the river which was already built as a way to reclaim the land for the making of the city by the government. We believe this would lead to flooding or water logging eventually as water wouldn’t be able to drain into the river any longer. Hence a flood mitigation strategy was proposed, which proposed a series of retention ponds, wetlands and green belts from which the whole masterplan emerged.