Dashain, new civic places for a society in transition

Abstract

On September 16th 2015, Nepal signed its new constitution, which, among others articles, claims the federalization of the country, makes the nation secular and allows freedom of expression. This event represents a milestone and a glimpse of hope after decades of internal political instability and uncertain administrations, which even led to ten years of civil war. These sociopolitical dynamics have been reflected mainly in the capital, Kathmandu, becoming one of the fastest-growing metropolitan areas in the South Asian region, thus forcing the country to confront an unprecedented challenge of rapid urbanization. The research brought to the conclusion that what the city needed the most were public spaces with political value, on different scales, from the small courtyard to the main square of the city thus an urban strategy made by squares had been developed. Later, the focus of the project moved on the smallest scale, the urban block, because the one that would have been possible to develop without the involvement of the institutions, designing a low tech wooden pavilion that, applying small changes to the same prototype, can be transformed in more variation of the same, and, since it is composed by modules, can be extended or shorted according to people’s needs. Finally, the low tech-ness of the pavilion allows the inhabitants themselves to build their own, thank to the use of small hollows which help to understand where to place the different beams, and, moreover, making the pavilion earthquake proof.