Badami
Town centre regeneration and sustainable tourism strategy
A heritage-led regeneration of Badami’s historic town centre, developing a sustainable tourism-led local economy.
Client: Catalytic Think Tank
Location: Bangalore, India
The winning entry in an international design competition for the rejuvenation of the Badami town precinct in Bangalore, India. The entry focused on an incremental approach to the sensitive regeneration of the town’s historic precinct for sustainable tourism. The approach was rooted in an understanding of its natural, built and cultural heritage and developed in collaboration with Gray Parikh Architects and Space Syntax.
Key project themes include:
Heritage-led regeneration for tourism
The spatial ‘loops’ and incremental implementation strategy
A resilient tourism-led local economy
Heritage-led regeneration for tourism
We use a context-driven layered approach to understand Badami across scales. It begins with the town’s natural heritage which has been the origin of its identity, followed by the built heritage which reflects its glorious past in the form of its architecture and historic monuments. Finally the cultural heritage, which includes an understanding of the people, their lifestyles, beliefs and everyday life.
The spatial ‘loops’
The analysis outlines the importance of Badami’s four types of latent capital that the historic precinct offers: historic exploration, adventure, leisure and recreation and social. It also highlighted the importance of ‘integrating loops’ in connecting ‘capital rich’ sites for mutual benefit, forming a robust foundation for Badami’s tourism industry, and making the whole greater than the sum of its parts.
A resilient tourism-led local economy
A vibrant tourist economy results in an increase in the demand for diversity of land-uses, which in turn would feed into the growth of the local economy and the upkeep of the town, further attracting tourists and visitors. Enabling symbiotic stakeholder participation, however, needs to be the basis of Badami’s regeneration, where tourism is a positive force for sustainable heritage conservation and improvement of the general quality of life.
