Kathputli Village - Redeveloping an Artists colony

A Slum Rehabilitation Project

Asia - India - New Delhi
Discipline: Architecture,Urban Design
Categories: housing,cultural,mixed use,transformation,city


Designer(s): Taru Ruchi
Jamia Millia Islamia
Faculty of Architecture and Ekistics, Department of Architecture
Tutor(s): Ar. S.M. Akhtar (Dean), Ar. Taiyaba Qadri (Guide), Ar. Nisar Khan


Kathputli is New Delhis largest performers colony, home to magicians, dancers, puppeteers, acrobats and drummers
whose families migrated here during the 1960s and 1970s from villages across India. An illegal settlement in an
impoverished northern pocket of the city, the colony is a thriving paradox. Its denizens invite their audiences into lofty
worlds where anything is possible, and yet the squalor of their precincts speaks of abject poverty and despair.

This thesis is an exercise not merely in low-cost housing and slum rehabilitation schemes, but in exploration of
possibilities. The idea is to create a scheme that resonates with the people of Kathputli, allowing them to thrive as
artists, providing them with a space where they can live and work and an interface from which they can interact with
the world at large. A scheme which allows them to keep their guild bonds, interact as a community, market their
products and perform to their own audience.

The architecture,therefore, has to grow out of the needs and the aspirations of the people of Kathputli and yet has to
be viable economically and replicable on an urban scale. It seeks to challenge the idea of economic segregation and
allows the visitors to the commercial zone and the art enthusiasts to spill in to the community centre and the recessed
workshops, so as to interact directly with the artists and artisans of Kathputli.

The project is fraught with possibilities, dilemmas, varying opinions, impossible altruistic goals, negligible economic
leeway and vast social connotations. The main question asked at each point is - How the function/service that this
micro system performs for the society can be still performed, while granting a better standard of life to the people,
without infringing on the just incomes to be made by any of the participants."