The Communal Lightbox: A Timber Market That Gives Mangaluru's Street Vendors a Roof and a Place

Most market redevelopments in Indian cities start by clearing the street. The Communal Lightbox starts by admitting that the street is the market. Instead of pushing hawkers to the margins so a cleaner formal building can rise, the project treats the informal vendor as essential urban infrastructure and builds a daylit timber framework around the life that already exists. The result is a market designed as a civic bridge. It reads less as a building to be visited and more as a connector that the city passes through.

Developed as a thesis project by Neethi Acharya, the proposal sits in Hampankatta, the historic commercial centre of Mangaluru, Karnataka. Its focus is the Central Market, formerly known as Webster Market, where formal shops and street vendors have long operated side by side. The vendors have done so without spatial recognition or infrastructural support. Acharya's argument is direct: harassment, poor facilities, waste mismanagement and ecological stress are design failures as much as policy ones. Architecture can do something about them.

A Monsoon Street That Already Works as a Market

The opening image is the project's real brief. Fruit vendors work a rain-slicked road, an auto-rickshaw is parked against stained walls, and the monsoon presses down on everything. This is Market Road. The site acts as a connective spine between Mangaluru's old and new quarters, and the area around it is dense and continuously active: narrow lanes, hawkers, meat markets, vegetable stalls and heavy foot traffic.

Acharya mapped this activity across morning, afternoon and evening, and the conclusion shapes everything that follows. The proposal does not drop a new object into the district. It stitches into the existing fabric, sharpening movement and spatial clarity rather than replacing them. The photograph also shows exactly what is missing: shelter, drainage, dignity. These are the things the building sets out to supply.

Zoning Fruit, Fish, Vegetables and Meat Without Building Walls Between Them

The axonometric and sections make the porosity legible. The fruit, fish, vegetable and meat markets are laid out as distinct zones, but the drawing places them inside the surrounding street buildings rather than behind a perimeter. The project describes these as layered spatial zones, a way of organising trade without separating informal vendors from the formal market. That distinction matters. Many market projects formalise vendors by enclosing them. Here, the vendors become part of a continuous ground plane that the public crosses freely.

The sections also reveal the environmental logic. South-facing skylights and an exterior louver system were tuned through sun path studies at the solstices and equinoxes. The aim is to cut heat gain while bringing in diffused daylight, which gives the project its name. Natural ventilation reduces reliance on mechanical systems, a sensible move for a building that handles fish and meat in a hot, humid coastal climate.

A Timber Mezzanine That Turns Shopping Into Watching

The interior perspective is where the proposal feels most convincing. A timber-floored mezzanine walkway runs between wood columns, fruit displays line the edge, and a trussed roof spans overhead. The upper level reads as one of the project's viewing decks. From there, shoppers can look down over the trading floor instead of being funnelled past it. The market becomes a place to linger as well as a place to buy.

The material choice carries an argument of its own. Acharya selects wood partly because it lowers lifecycle carbon emissions compared with steel and concrete. Locally available materials and debris reuse strategies reinforce that position. In a monsoon city, timber needs careful detailing to survive. Still, the warmth it gives this interior is a deliberate counterpoint to the concrete shopping blocks that so often replace traditional markets.

A Screened Edge, a Planted Plaza and a Ground That Gives Back

From the street, the building shows a timber-screened facade next to a planted plaza. A large tree shades cyclists, pedestrians and parked cars. The louvers filter sun and soften the building's presence on Market Road, while the plaza does the civic work. It extends the central spine that Acharya describes as changing over the course of the day. Temporary urban furniture, seating terraces and shaded boulevards let the same ground serve trade, rest, community events and chance encounters.

Much of the project's ambition sits out of sight, below this plaza. Despite heavy rainfall, Mangaluru suffers from groundwater depletion, so the proposal introduces aquifer recharge systems and underground storage chambers. Waste gets the same systemic treatment: the market's food waste is processed within 24 hours and converted into manure. That closes a loop that usually ends in a landfill, and it generates revenue for the market itself.

Why This Project Matters

The Communal Lightbox is valuable because it refuses the usual trade-off between order and informality. Indian cities depend on street vendors for employment, yet public projects routinely treat them as clutter to be controlled. Acharya inverts that premise. The vendor sits at the centre of the brief, and the architecture, from daylit roofs to manure cycles, is built to support that economy rather than discipline it.

Some ideas would need testing beyond a thesis, including the durability of timber in a coastal monsoon setting and the management model behind on-site waste processing. The direction is still the right one. By pairing climate-responsive design, circular systems and water resilience with a genuinely porous plan, the project shows how a market can again become what it once was in Hampankatta: a social condenser where the city meets itself.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Neethi Acharya

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Project credits: The Communal Lightbox by Neethi Acharya.