EnteKochi Design Competition

Design the future city!

The Kochi Municipal Corporation (KMC) and the GIZ (German Agency for International Cooperation) jointly call for all creative minds in the field of urbanism, architecture, landscape design as well as environmental and social science experts to participate in the next phase of EnteKochi (My Kochi) - the EnteKochi-Competition!

The EnteKochi-Competition is a national level Urban Design Competition (UDC) that aims to jointly ‘design the future city’ of Kochi. It is envisaged to plan and then facilitate the implementation of an integrated civic project that is of key relevance for the sustainable development of Kochi.

 

About the Site

The focus area for the Urban Design Competition is the Mullassery Canal Precinct in downtown Ernakulam, which is part of the Central Business District (CBD) of Kochi. Historically, the Mullassery canal was built for inland mobility, connecting the backwaters, in the west of Kochi, to the Perandoor Canal, in the east. The eastern end has the Kerala State Regional Transport Corporation (KSRTC) bus terminus that caters to intra and inter-city public transportation. Waterfront reclamation of the past, at the juncture where the canal meets the backwaters, has produced a linear public recreational avenue called Marine Drive, juxtaposed with housing towers and commercial buildings.

Over the years the canal seems to have been built upon by adjacent plots as its use for effective transportation faded into the past with the advent of other modes of personal and public transport and road centric development. While the total length of the canal is 1.3 km, more than half of it is presently covered by concrete slabs which are used for on-street parking and dedicated vending zones. The land use pattern, along the stretch of the canal, transforms as we move from east to west. It is lined with prominent educational institutions of the city, heritage sites, major shopping avenues, street markets, warehouses, formal and informal housing. The canal is surrounded by low-rise high-density development of the ’80s that transformed the city of Kochi.