EPHEMERAL URBANISM: CITIES IN CONSTANT FLUX

Kumbh Mela is a religious festival that takes place every twelve years in India. Built in no more than a couple of weeks, it accommodates a total flux of nineteen million people during the three months’ duration of the festivity, with seven million people simultaneously present at the festival’s peak moment.
We can learn a lot from the urban layout to the allocation of services (temples, residences, shops, health facilities, police, and administration of the place) passing through rather sophisticated infrastructure (each road ends in a bridge that crosses the river, maximizing the connectivity with the territory), ending in the appropriate and restrictive material choice (the whole operation is conducted using only five easily available recyclable materials). We may transfer some knowledge from this almost spontaneous but coordinated operation so that we get the basics right when facing the problem of the rapid process of urbanization. The ability to deliver a settlement at incredible speed and on a huge scale and still be able to balance the individual initiative with collective living is a great lesson on how to coordinate the common good and the logistics of the construction of the settlement itself.
This is the importance of the documentation undertaken by the Rahul Mehrotra team, which, besides capturing the religious and cultural richness of the event, was able to extract lessons for the urban challenges facing the planet. It was not only the frequency of the phenomenon that put a lot of pressure on the enterprise (if they had lost something, they would have had to wait twelve more years). The festival ends with the monsoon, when the rains and rising river level wash through the whole settlement, leaving not a single trace of the massive occupation of the territory. Its ephemeral condition may be the ultimate lesson for how to deal respectfully with the planet.