RECONFIGURING HOUSING: DENSITY AND RENTAL ECONOMY IN GANGTOK

The thesis began with Daragoan, a neighborhood in Gangtok that has been changing steadily over the last decade. Once used for agriculture, this land now holds buildings that are built tightly together, shaped by slope, roads, and available plot sizes. Families have added rooms, floors, and staircases as and when they could afford to. The result is not a planned township, but a form of urban life that has grown from the ground up, negotiated through ownership, rental, and shared use.

This change was slow and sectional, built up incrementally by families responding to land division, marriage, migration, and opportunity. What emerged is not a master-planned neighborhood, but a deeply negotiated one formed through everyday arrangements, economic needs, and shifting family structures.

When I first visited, it felt like everything was full. Buildings pushed close to each other. Stairways ran between houses. Terraces were used in different ways by different people, for drying clothes, children playing, or prayer gatherings. Open space was not absent, but it had moved up. In Daragoan, terraces became courtyards, corridors became meeting points, and institutions like churches operated out of homes and rooftops. The built environment was not just dense, it was layered.

The commons, such as terraces, courtyards, and corridors, are not designed as set pieces within buildings. Nor are they imagined as fixed or surplus. They are central to how people live together. In Daragoan, there are spaces activated by repetition, such as weekly Sunday services, a child’s afternoon play, or a neighbor’s drying clothes. They are shaped by routines, adjustments, and social ties as much as by architecture. Over time, a terrace becomes a living room, and a parking lot turns into a playground. These spaces are not static; they are temporal, taking on different roles at different times of day or week.

The thesis emphasizes how house types and spatial configurations shape residents’ lives, critiquing the notion that private ownership leads to privatization. It argues that expansions and dense housing typologies have led to commons, community, and networks while identifying spaces of publicness, shared use, privacy, and disparity. Sectional layers interweave homes and institutions, embedding social life within interconnected spaces.

Conceptual strategies

The research did not begin with a fixed site, but with observing how people were already building and living. Families often started construction with one or two rooms, completing floors over time. Many houses were built with rental use in mind, with separate staircases, four-room layouts, and shared corridors. Some homes included student PGs or ground-floor churches. The building section carried clues about publicness and privacy, ownership and sharing.

The selected site is part of this condition. It lies on a 30-degree slope, The plot houses three nuclear families occupying the top three and two floors of the buildings. The lower two floors accommodate 18 rental families across the three structures. The original family home has been converted into a student PG, and an adjacent empty plot is reserved for future rental development. The strategy is to merge, create better spatial possibilities and support the development of a rental-based living model that is both functional and flexible. A public stair runs along the side, connecting the upper and lower roads. This stair is more than access; it shapes the edge of the building and becomes a point of arrival for many.

The project does not try to redesign the entire neighborhood. It works within it, extending what is already happening and drawing connections between what is built and what is shared. The building follows a grid derived from existing room sizes in Daragoan, 3x3, 3x4, and 3x5. Using this grid, volumes are placed to respond to the slope, and then carved to create light courts, stilts, terraces, and small terraced courtyards. These are not excess spaces, they are what allow for pause, cross-ventilation, and shared use.

Each level in the building carries a different degree of publicness. At the bottom, there are shops and small institutions that face the street. Above that, rental units are organized around shared terraces. Terraces act as buffers, become shared between rental units and become an extension to their living spaces on special occasions. Another is used for prayer services on weekends. A small shop opens onto a widened landing, where neighbors wait or stop to talk. A corridor becomes a place to sit. These spaces are not designed as commons, they become common through use.

Language

The building section was not imagined as a diagram, but as a living sequence. From bottom to top, one moves through different temperatures of life, busy in the morning, quiet in the afternoon, slow again at dusk. These observations became part of the design. Instead of separating out homes and institutions, the project lets them coexist. A small library connects to the street on one side and to the student unit on the other. A terrace is partially covered with translucent roofing, allowing light while keeping it usable through the year. Materials are kept light, using steel framing, insulated panels, and timber windows. These follow what is already common in the area, while allowing for future changes.

The design is not a solution to density, but a way of living within it. It does not remove the closeness, but tries to shape it. It looks for room between buildings and lives, not for expansion but for relation. The rental model is not treated as temporary or peripheral. In Daragoan, many renters live in homes without cross-ventilation, direct sunlight, or enough space to gather as a family. They are part of the neighborhood, yet often excluded from its imagination. This project works against that. It tries to create spaces where renters are not just accommodated, but respected, given access to shared terraces, well-lit corridors, and spatial clarity.

Over time, the building may change. A room becomes a shop. A terrace becomes more private. A corridor is enclosed. These are not flaws of design, they are part of it. The grid and section are flexible enough to take on these shifts.

The aim is not permanence, but continuity, a way of building that responds to terrain, slope, and social life without fixing everything in place.

In the end, this project builds with what is already there, room sizes, habits, shared edges, and slow construction. It learns from the neighborhood and tries to return something back to it, a structure that supports the commons not by defining them, but by making them easier to hold.