Serjeant Award for Excellence in Drawing
Mohalla Van: A post-masterplan urban vision for Bhopal
Part 2 Project 2025
Siena Cornish
Marco Lin
Joel Boyd
Jamie Ferguson
Beth Kippin
Benjamin Hanger
University of Bath | UK
Mohalla Van presents a post-masterplan, post-anthropocentric rethinking of North Indian urbanism. Situated in Bhopal, a city suspended between ecological precarity and cultural resilience, forty years on from the devastating Union Carbide gas disaster, the project envisions a new urban morphology rooted in the relational ecologies of place, memory and more-than-human kinship. Built around revitalising catastrophically polluted waterways, creating a polycentric network of socio-ecological commons, Mohalla Van proposes a reimagined mode of urban design - domino urbanism - which looks to harness historic Indian influential design in order to spark regenerative change. This is achieved through the creation of key nodal architectural interventions and precise demonstrative housing developments.
The project is grounded in decolonial theory, methodology and representation, with a visual language developed to blend traditional Indian miniature painting with local Gond artwork, eschewing the Eurocentric dichotomy of ‘render’ and ‘orthographic’. Growing from the stories of Bhopali residents, the project aspires to showcase an exemplar for North Indian design, presenting pragmatism through visual fantasy to inspire the re-centring of old Bhopali dynamic spatial practice and help create new resilient, regenerative and thriving city fabric.
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