This international design competition focused on one of Mumbai, India’s most important public spaces. A wildly successful preserve, Maharashtra Nature Park serves a population that is desperate for natural space in a rapidly growing city. The proposed plan organizes the existing park into distinct zones. The most public zone centers on an expanded community center, surrounded with formal gardens, education areas, and other active programs. This zone also becomes the sponge that absorbs annual monsoon floods, integrating the existing reservoir into a linked system with the river that will protect adjacent settlements from devastating flood surges. All of these zones are linked by an elegant pedestrian bridge that connects across the Mithi River to a new economic development hub. The bridge becomes a boardwalk within the park that encourages visitors to meander through the preserve while keeping them elevated to protect the wildlife below.

Work completed at DumontJanks while Kevin Cunningham was employed as a landscape architect.

©DumontJanks

LOCATION / Mumbai, India

TEAM / CBT Architects, StudioPOD, ARUP Engineering

DATE / 2016