that is the largest single-purpose human gathering on earth.

river banks and set about marking large grids in the sand. In a span of just three
months, government and municipal officials build an entire city on the 24-sq km
expanse, complete with various styles of tent housing,

From January to March, this “pop-up megacity” of the Kumbh Mela is inhabited by a
floating population of more than 35 million people, and then quickly dismantled. By
the time the next monsoon arrives, all traces of the massive city disappear and the
river banks are once more submerged.
The Kumbh is an extreme form of temporary urbanism, and I believe looking at
extremes is productive,
city is built out of makeshift, disposable or reusable materials that are often stored
for future use.

“The ephemeral landscape of the Kumbh is interesting because of the wonderful

mapping of the formal over the informal,” he said. “For instance, the grids within the
fair are organised formally by the state, but the akharas (Hindu religious
denominations) within the grids are organised informally.”
We need to think of reversibility more strategically when designing our cities for the
future.”

Most of the year, “Kumbh City” is not an inhabited

part of Allahabad. There is no pre-existing water or electricity supply there, or any system to get rid
of human waste. But by the time the festival started this year in January, Kumbh City was a
functioning metropolis with a population larger than most permanent cities in the world and many
small countries too. The government erects vast tent encampments, some 40,000 toilets, hospitals,
markets, emergency services, food stands, supply shops, offices and hundreds of temples. The
following are some of the facts related to Kumbh Mela 2013.
Kumbh 2001 was for 44 days while Kumbh 2013 was for 55 days.
Country’s population was 102.87 Crore in 2001, it was estimated to be 121.02 Crore in 2011
The State population was 16.61 Crore in 2001 which has risen to 19.96 Crore in 2011.
Allahabad Nagar Nigam had 9.75 lakh population in 2001 which was 12.47 lakh in 2011
Amongst the visitors, around 10 lakhs were foreign tourists.
The total budget for Maha Kumbh 2013 was Rs 1,200 crore, which was 200 crore more than
that of the 2001 Maha Kumbh.
The Mela generated employment for over 6 lakh people. Rs 12,000 crore flew into the coffers
of the UP government as revenue and taxes.
18 pontoon bridges and 35,000 public toilets were built for pilgrims.
156 km of new roads, made of chequered steel plates were laid on the river bank.
571 km of water pipelines was laid, 800 km of electric wires and 48 power sub-stations had
been set up in the Mela area.
125 ration shops, 4 godowns opened in Mela area for pilgrims to buy grains, groceries and
vegetables.
2,500 religious and social organizations from across the world participated.
30,000 policemen, 30 new police stations, and 72 companies of paramilitary forces were
deployed to provide security during the Mela.
120 CCTV cameras were installed in Mela area and Allahabad city.
22 doctors and 120 ambulances on round-the-clock duty at the new 100- bed central hospital in
Kumbh Mela area.
50.83 sq km the total area where the Kumbh is held, almost double the size of the last one in
2001.
Rs 6,000 crore was the daily rent for the plush Swiss cottages set up by UP Tourism.
GPS-Enabled Systems to locate their spiritual and religious heads and the camps/ashrams were
set up in the Mela area.
To estimate exact number of crowds the government had sought cooperation from ISRO and
Remote Sensing Application Centre. They captured photographs of the entire Mela area every
24 hours.
Source: (Arora, 2013) [2]

The city of the Kumbh Mela challenges the idea of sustainability, as the anxiety for
preserving equilibrium, by engaging us to think of urban design as a reversible
operation. Upon examining the stunning images of the ephemeral city, we tend to
fix the eye on the incommensurable expansion the city undergoes when it is in
operation. However, what is most remarkable about the Kumbh Mela is not that it is
only constructed in such a short period of time, but also that it has the ability to be
disassembled as quickly as it was built. The Kumbh Mela raises a nuanced set of
questions about how reversibility could be better imagined in the production of
future cities. In a matter of weeks, the biggest public gathering in the world deploys
its own roads, pontoon bridges, cotton tents serving as residences and venues for
spiritual meetings, and a spectrum of social infrastructure –all replicating the
functions of an actual city. This pop-up megacity serves approximately 5 to 7
million people who gather for fifty-five days and an additional flux of 10 to 20
million people who come for 24-hour cycles on the five main bathing dates. Once
the festival is over, the whole city is disassembled as rapidly as it was deployed,
reversing the constructive operation, disaggregating the settlement to its basic
components, and recycling a majority of the material that was used.

The implementation strategy, which is generic and employs low-tech construction

techniques, facilitates the shaping of the most amazing buildings and morphologies,
leaving open the possibility of reversing such operations once the festival is
finished. This also allows the materials to be recycled by their reincorporation into
regional economies and local industries. The few building techniques implemented
at the Kumbh are based on the repetition and recombination of a basic module with
simple inter-connections. This is usually a stick (approximately 6 to 8 feet long)
that by aggregation generates diverse enclosures in a wide range of forms from
small tents into complex building paraphernalia, providing expression to various
social institutions such as theaters, monuments, temples, hospitals, etc. All of them
are constructed out of the same elements: bamboo sticks used as the framework
and laminar materials such as corrugated metal and fabric. The simplicity of the
building system not only facilitates the attributes for assembly, reconfiguration, and
disassembly on site, but also facilitates the logistics and channels of distribution for
each component and piece. One person or groups of people provide the modulation
of every material in a way that can be carried and handled in absence of heavy
machinery. Material components are small and light enough to be easily
transported and distributed to every corner of the settlement in a rapid and efficient
manner facilitating both construction and reconstruction, as well as formation and
reabsorption into the various ecologies and geographies of the region. Everything is
constructed and afterwards disassembled with equal ease.

A large part of the common infrastructure is also disassembled once the Kumbh is
over. For instance, by digging up wastewater and water supply pipes, Jal Nigam
Contractors removed all of the tap connections. In the same way that tents are
deconstructed and separated by materials to be returned to their original supplier,
tap connections, motors, and pipes are returned to the Jal Nigam store from which
they were originally ordered. Once disaggregated, the material is reused in different
locations of Uttar Pradesh in other Jal Nigam projects. A meter-long pipe is then
welded as an attachment to the tube wells, in order to extend their height and
prevent the river from filling them up.

Part of the common infrastructure remains on site. Sewage pits, for instance, are
uncovered from their bamboo structures, treated with chemicals and covered with
sand; the same is done with water reservoirs. Other kinds of infrastructure, like
sandbags and toilets, get removed. Toilets are one of the most dispersed
infrastructures built by the Kumbh Mela administration. The sweeper community
oversees toilet removal; they take the ceramic seats to the main health store while
the rest of the brick and bamboo is sold to different contractors to be reused in
other locations. The same happens with electricity infrastructure. Wires are taken
down and wound, poles are disassembled dividing them in concrete parts, and
metal pieces are taken back to storage. Special electricity boards keep a digital
inventory of every registered item.

Roads and pontoons are taken apart sector by sector and brought to three main
storage locations in the area: one in the parade ground, the second near the
railway yard, and the largest in Jhusi, next to the bus stand. Bridges are broken up
in parts, first the railing, then the plates, and finally the joist and pontoons. Once
all the material is disassembled, the state government decides where to apportion
the bridges and roads. This depends on the different district needs (for instance,
villages with mud roads that are prone to flooding). Once these decisions are made,
the infrastructure is distributed and reconstructed in diverse locations of Uttar
Pradesh.

nce the disassembly activity is over, the site reestablishes its natural, annual
patterns. People from nearby villages prepare beds for planting seasonal
vegetables, like cucumber and gourds. Thick grass or thatch that served as the
matting for the tent floors is usually burned, making the soil more fertile. Small
wells are also built near creating a bountiful agricultural site. The cremation ground
on Sector Five is eventually overtaken with vegetation and the river’s edge is
recolonized.

In a way, this reversible condition becomes a counterpoint to our contemporary

building culture, being the only aspect that has been notoriously absent from the
current debate over what to do with the afterlife of ‘built-things’ we perceive as not
useful anymore. Today buildings are constructed to last as long as possible. We
usually don’t consider the eventual need for transformation, meaning that the
provision of options for reconfiguration, in cases of obsolescence, is not
appropriately factored in the designs. We have developed a highly articulated
technique for constructing and assembling all sorts of structures, which allow us to
handle more complex and efficient construction processes. However, very little has
been imagined in relation to progressing in the development of more efficient ways
to disassemble and deconstruct the things we build. Paradoxically, what we can
learn from the Kumbh Mela is that the most unsustainable practices do not rely on
the construction of the built environment, but rather in how inefficient we are with
the reconfiguration of space that is already built. Unfortunately, in more permanent
settings, demolition has been the generalized answer for opening up space that the
city requires for growth and adapting to new needs. In short, the lack of
incorporation of disassembly strategies as an inherent part of the design
imagination – together with construction protocols– obstructs the fluid and
sustainable metabolism of contemporary urban space.
This settlement is laid out on a grid, constructed and deconstructed within a matter of weeks.
Within this grid, multiple aspects of contemporary urbanism come to fruition, including spatial
zoning, an electricity system, food and water distribution, physical infrastructure construction,
public health programs, public gathering spaces, and nighttime social events. The ultimate goal
of the pilgrims is to bathe at the convergence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers, but even this
act is organized into a larger procession, where pilgrims are given specific times and
opportunities to bathe.This schedule is determined by the sect and community group a person
belongs to, with time allocations made to facilitate crowd management. When the festival is not
in session, the ground on which the temporary city sits is used for agriculture.

Prayagra

Sahrawi refugee camps

constructs sturdy adobe-type homes in the Western Saharan refugee camps (pop.
90,0000) from plastic bottles and sand.
how to improve the energy efficiency of adobe houses, to make them more resistant
and lower their interior temperature.
So I did my masters on what is called the Nubian Vault, which is a construction
technique that makes a curved surface using mud brick. So I did my masters on what
is called the Nubian Vault, which is a construction technique that makes a curved
surface using mud brick.
I use the sand-filled bottles like bricks, held together with a mixture of earth and
water, or sometimes with cement and river sand, which is stronger. The design has
a double roof with a ventilation shaft in-between, which lowers interior
temperatures. We put a layer of adobe over the bottles, and a nice pattern appears,
almost like art. Most of the homes in the camp are a square shape, but I made mine
a circular shape to give them more strength. Also during storms, sand accumulates
around the walls of square –shaped homes. This doesn’t happen so much when they
are circular.
But the homes are holding up in extreme weather conditions, and interior
temperatures have proved to be about 5 degrees lower. I have built 25 houses so far,
across all the five camps. We prioritise older and sick people, or those who have a
handicap.

These bottles are then filled with sand and straw that is pressed tightly to give the
building block greater resistance.

"A plastic bottle is 20 times more resistant than an adobe brick," the young Sahrawi
engineer emphasised.

Once the main structure is created, its walls are covered with cement and limestone,
and then painted white to reflect the sun's rays and keep room temperatures cool.
To improve air flow in the structure even further, the roof has a double layer, with its
first covering made of mats which are built from recycled plastic, followed by a layer
of cement. These architectural features make plastic houses more efficient and
resistant to the rigours of the desert.

'The objective is to alleviate the suffering of the

Sahrawi, letting them live with more dignity,
and to build ecological and sustainable homes'
-Tateh Lehbib, Sahrawi engineer
The round shape of the building was carefully chosen as well. According to Lehbib,
the shape avoids "light rays entering directly, which reduces heat flow". Two
windows at different heights allow for better ventilation.

Additionally, the rounded exterior prevents sand from accumulating on the outside of
the structure during sandstorms, which is a common occurrence in typical adobe
square houses of the camp. "When a very strong one arrives, the dunes can reach the
top of the roof," Lehbib said.

"My son sleeps at night in it and he also plays in it. Before, he was in a tent of cloth
with a roof of zinc sheet, and often the fabrics and the wood broke,” declared the
boy's mother Albatul Kadiri.
“It is much more comfortable in the plastic house. In his other [previous] room, the
temperature was very high, sometimes unbearable,” Kadiri said. "At first, when it
was being built, my neighbours looked at us in surprise, but now they are very
interested in knowing what it's like inside."
According to Lehbib, when time is of the essence, this single-family dwelling can be
built in one week at the cost of around 250 euros, which is much cheaper than
building a mud-brick house which can cost up to 1,000 euros.

It is considered to be the largest public gathering in

the world, with over 100 million people in attendance
in 2013.

United Nations Organization, UNESCO has given Kumbh Fair an

intangible cultural heritage of humanity.
Kumbh Mela is the most abundant, peaceful religious gathering on
earth, where people of different classes participate without any
discrimination.
Mass gaherings

Burning man
Hajj pilgrimaje
Ocoberfes

\
“What struck me about the Kumbh Mela was the sheer number of people and seeing the scale manage
itself or be managed by select interventions on the part of different entities.” -Tarun Khanna Harvard
University South Asia Institute

“It is wonderful, the power of a faith like that, that can make multitudes upon multitudes of the old and
weak and the young and frail enter without hesitation or complaint upon such incredible journeys and
endure the resultant miseries without repining. It is done in love, or it is done in fear; I do not know
which it is. No matter what the impulse is, the act born of it is beyond imagination, marvelous to our
kind of people, the cold whites.” -Mark Twain after visiting the Kumbh Mela in 1895
Overall, 23.8% of
pilgrims stayed longer than 30 days
and only 15.0% of pilgrims stayed
longer than 60 days.
HOW TO REDEFINE
KURDISTAN’S
CURRENT REFUGEE
CAMPS INTO AN
OFF-THE-GRID (OTG) CITY
USING
LOCAL MATERIALS?
areana
Sand is a granular material with a grain size
ranging from 0.0625 mm to 2mm. Being composed
of finely divided rock and mineral particles,
the composition of sand varies according
to its origin with s ilica being its most common
constituent in desert areas. As a building
material, sand has many beneficial characteristics
and has therefore been used extensive ly
for this purpose in the past. The grains are
very resistant to compressive forces and small
enough to be included into building elements
of various shapes. Sand gra ins pile up and distribute themselves
accord ing to cellular automata rules, arranging
themselves into tight packed cone-shaped
piles with an angle of 35 %. This critical state,
achieved by self-organization, is scale-less
and independent of the individual grains. It is
a relat ional pattern, which at a macro level
manifests itself as a constant behavior irrespective
of the variations of its constituents.

The size of the opening

and the time span in which the sand valve is
left open willl determine the s ize of the sand
pi le. Due to the impact small
variations in the design of this nozzle can have
on the outcome of the structure produced, the
calibration of the nozzle specifications is a
crucial part of this project. The integration of sensors that scan the topog rap
hy. a llow the machine to be programmed
with the basic intelligence needed to function
in an environmentally conscious way by adapting
to its surroundings. The two most important design considerations
are the nozzle aperture and the offset
between the two nozzles. When a stream of
falling sand forms a pile, the diameter of the
tip of this pile is lim ited according to the diameter
of the nozzle. In other words, the smaller
the nozzle aperture, the smaller the minimum
pile which is able to be made with it.

At the micro level, a sandbox,

as done by Frei Otto, was used to investigate
the minimum piles, single sand pi les that form
the building blocks of the structures geometry.
Next, the meso level deals with the effects the
possib le combinations of the minimum piles.
The effects different combinations can have on
the larger, fractal pi le, was tested by scripting
them in grasshopper. Finally, at the macro
level, the landscaping of the environment done
by the machine was explored with the help of
the programming language processing.
In additional to a fractal pattern of apertures,
a hexagonal pattern of apertures was tested.
The hexagonal patterned sand box allowed
for very varying format ions to be produced as
all components were able to be manipulated
separately. It is a very basic, manual form of
parametric design in which the fabr ication
process is central. The shapes emerge from
real time input which alter the parameters of
the fabrication process.

The topological order in the sand formation

is based in grouping grains of sand in piles.
where the only restriction is the formation
angle. With an additive process we configure
diffe irent formations where the binder is forced
down by a certain path under the force of gravity,
solid ifying the sand

the machine itself,

the vacuuming arm and the depositing arm. In the simulation we study how are the patterns
produced by an autonomus machine, and
the relationship between the deposited piles
(marked in green) and the vacummed piles
(marked in red).

AREANA's most important advantages are

the fast and low cost production method. The
material acts as a mould to itself, therefore
its cost can be estimated to only 1€/m2• Ad ditio1nally,
since it is all sourced onsite, the
transportation costs are eliminated making it
an economically and environmentally sustainable
design solution. Oependling on the
topo,graphic, geological and environmental
conditions the various emerging geometries
can be distingu ished into large and medium
scale. In a nutshell the method can be defined
as a "real data design process spanning over
a long time". This visual product is translated
into a g-code, meaning a sequence of computated
point coordinates that can be directly
fed into the machine.

At this point it is important to note that the

temporality of the structures is subject to
the used type of binder and can therefore be
adjusted to the needs of each situation. Lab
testing has shown that the structures would
become more robust when different kinds of
binders were appl ied.