As a child, city and people around me existed in an absolute and isolated sense. For me the world was limited till the extent my vision reached. Everything beyond was alien. As I grew up, I began to realize world outside my view and my city. This subsequently made me believe that correlation exists between my city and a world afar. Any change out there will have an impact on my immediate settlement. Transformation at micro level has its factors operating at macro level. This inter relationship of different changes happening due to various causes resulting into varied impacts gave me an understanding of ‘dynamics’.
It was during my graduation in architecture that city dynamics started making more sense and I too became more sensitive towards it. Now perception was more relative and interdependent. It was during that time when I was confronted to phrases which were somewhere or the other associated with the image of the city – ‘Sanskari Nagari’, ‘Industrial City’, ‘polluting industries’, ‘PSU’, ‘City of Palace’, ‘Declining city’, ‘Closing of chemical industries’, ‘M.S.University’, ‘Navratri’, ‘Kamati garden’, ‘Biotech park’, ‘The banyan city’etc. thus city became an inescapable part of my thoughts. And questions stated arising since then about changing dynamics that I had been hearing and experiencing consciously or sub consciously.
After joining Masters on Planning at CEPT University, these questions received strength and curiosity increased. And the seed of an exploratory research on changing dynamics were sown. Now area of interest has widened. Matter of concern was not just a city but on everything associated with it. ‘People’ are the center point of the concept called city and for a settlement to establish, source of economic activities is basic requirement. Industrialization is one such economic trigger. Industries and Education are two important sectors associated with the journey of Baroda city. But impact of industrialization was more visible and significant. With preliminary studies on Baroda city I could infer that transformations in the city and regions around were highly elastic to industrialization occurring. From setting up of large scale petrochemical PSU in immediate post-independence era to notification of Bio-tech SEZs – the change is evident in structure and pattern.
First question thus comes to mind is what shift in industries has occurred and second question that follows is what are the key factors that triggered this dynamism? An attempt to answer these two fundamental questions forms the base of my exploratory research ‘Industrial Dynamics of Vadodara’.
Origin of the thought occurred from a city level, but cannot be explored well unless a regional scale is not analyzed. Vadodara district and its industrial dynamics… thus becomes the interest area.
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