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Jo Coenen's design for new satellite city aims to house a rapidly increasing population
The Indian economy is one of the fastest growing economies worldwide, and Karnataka is playing a leading role in this development. The 'Bangalore Metropolitan Region' attracted the world's biggest software companies as well as many software related services and industries. This still continuing growth resulted in an exponentially fast growing urban infrastructure which nowadays is facing logistics related problems.
The Bangalore Metropolitan Region Development Authority provides the umbrella under which the Bidadi Integrated Township Project (BITP) can be realised in order to decongest Bangalore. This is the main goal for BITP: providing infrastructure in order to attract economic investments and residential development projects. In this sense, BITP is a pilot project; four other satellite towns will be developed in the near future. Because of the fact that its main goal is to attract economic activities it will provide jobs and housing for the ever continuing migration of people from the countryside towards the new city. By carefully designing BITP the designers will urbanise the project area.
Coenen designed a city of 3,800 hectares for 500,000 to 1 million inhabitants. Departure point for the design is the scale, model and the entities as they can be found in a city comparable to the city of Amsterdam. Coenen emphasises that the design is above all a grid, a model, not a ready-made town. Within this model he situated four ‘city poles' marked by high-rise buildings. The plan also provides the city with two business boulevards, a cultural quarter, a science and university campus, a sports park, a villa quarter situated onto the nearby hills and four small-scale cities with mostly living facilities. Just like every city, the design knows many different atmospheres and entities.
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