THE MELTING POT

Client

CTBUH High Rise Competition

Year

2021

Location

Mumbai Coastal Region

The Melting Pot- A prototypical floating vertical city is a solution to the issue of continuous rising sea levels due to which the coastal cities, which are currently home to 300 million people, will be vulnerable to excessive flooding by 2050.

Hence, it becomes urgent to adapt, innovate, and prepare to accommodate the future billions in sustainable, efficient, and inclusive cities.

Our proposal answers this need of the future by creating a culturally-expressive vertical city that floats over the oceanic waters. It is a recreation of city fabric, by focusing on its physical, social as well as emotional essence.

It is believed that by 2050, 90 percent of the coastal urban cities will grow so rapidly due to the constant migration in search of better opportunities that half of the world population will be living within 100 kilometres from the coast (Adger, 2005). On the other hand, scientists have warned that such coastal areas, currently home to 300 million people, will be vulnerable to excessive flooding by 2050.

570 low-lying coastal cities will face projected sea level rise by at least 0.5 meters which will put over 800 million people at risk from the impacts of rising seas and storm surges.

Hence, it becomes urgent to adapt, innovate, and prepare to accommodate the future billions in sustainable, efficient, and inclusive cities that can foster and answer the problem caused by the parasitic behaviour of delta cities.

Our proposal, The Melting Pot, answers this need of the future by creating a culturally-expressive vertical city that floats over the oceanic waters to adapt to the increasing population, rising sea levels and provide resilience to the climate refugees.

The proposal is expected to be a prototypical design that can be produced for any coastal city and can blend as per the needs, wants, habits, and culture of the city and its people. It also tries to replicate the horizontal urban city into a vertical one to accommodate the high population in these coastal areas.

To recreate the city, is to recreate its physical, social as well as emotional essence in the proposed structure. Hence, the city has been divided into the following four fundamental dimensions, isolating or removing any one of which will have an irreversible impact on climate change and social sustainability of the city:

DIM. 1 – NEED/ESSENTIALS/EKISTICS/5 ELEMENTS
DIM. 2 – WANT/HABITS/CULTURE/5 D
DIM. 3 – EXPRESSIVE BODY/CONSTANT
DIM. 4 – TIME/TEMPORALITY/CHANGING

As the culture of street act as an important aspect in city's nature, this vertical city has streets as melting points that allows people to connect and collaborate horizontally as well as vertically. This interconnection is introduced with tetrahedron modules (representing nature) which are further provided with functions in an inter-mixed manner to break the consistency and create a walkable community.

To create a city that is human-centred and collaborative, our project revolves around the melting point theory, coined in 19th century, according to which people from various cultures come to a certain space and contribute to create a new, unique heterogeneous culture. Our Proposal allows the contributions from many cultures in such a way that they are indistinguishable from one another and are effectively melted together.

In our Proposal, these dimensions are used to capture the need and wants of the Mumbai community, 40 percent of which is projected to be sunken under sea by 2050. The Dimension 1 and 2 are human, society and context-based, elaborating which provides us tangible and intangible characteristics preferred by the people and communities of Mumbai. It also brings up the programmatic behaviour and spatial preferences of people.

Dimension 3 is independent of the context and tries to provide a cocoon to the above two dimensions capturing as well as expressing it through the structure. The structure can, hence, blend as per the requirements of the programs/spaces extracted from above two dimensions. The elements of the structure however remains same for all the cities like streets, use of tetrahedron modules, cores, but the furniture of streets, size of tetrahedron modules and core blends with the requirement of the city.