DOI: 10.5176/2425-0112_UPPD18.145
Authors: Bhavana Gulaty and Arshia Chaudhri
Abstract: A city always contains more than any inhabitant can know and a great city always makes the unknown and the possible spurs to the imagination.” – Rebecca Solnit The larger collective imagination of a city’s dwellers is shaped by myriad interventions in its fabric which are the outcome of a recurring cycle of urban transformations and regeneration. Insertion of mega projects in a city’s mesh often trigger these transformations and are singularly instrumental in “Powering Cities” by propelling them into hitherto unknown territories in their morphological charter. Event spaces such as Exhibition and Convention Centres are one such urban typology that brings with them a plethora of unknown possibilities as implied in the quote above. In a globalized world with seamless flows of people and information, these venues to exchange knowledge and trade in goods and services within a country and increasingly, between countries, have become a veritable symbol of a city’s identity. The most significant impact of these spaces in global parlance is their contribution to the M.I.C.E (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Events) industry. MICE Destinations the world over have been documented to have played a pivotal role as Agents of Change spurring a wide range of long lasting transformations impacting the city at multiple levels. In the Asian context, the India International Convention and Expo Centre (IICC) at New Delhi is designed to be a magnificent addition in the fabric of the city. Conceptualized by AECOM, this planned mega development will house 1 million sq.m of built up space in an integrated campus targeting the M.I.C.E, retail, hospitality and commercial sectors spread over a site area of 90 Ha. The IICC ‘Blueprint’ corresponds to the emerging typology of “Convention Districts” which are landmark mixed use precincts anchored by MICE entities at their core. The theoretical equivalent of the Convention District for this paper is the ‘COEX (Convention & Exhibition) Biosphere’ which postulates such developments as being ecosystems unto themselves. Posited against standalone Convention and Exhibition Centres, the COEX Biosphere has been observed to induce urban transformations that have taken cities to the next level in dynamism. This dynamism is reciprocally central to the success of the Convention and Exhibition Centres propelling US cities, for instance, to retrofit such existing standalone buildings. Further, the precepts of urban planning theory and practice underpinning the COEX Biosphere is the pivot for evolving the programmatic base for contemporary Greenfield MICE projects planned and executed globally over the past decade. The central premise of the paper is to map the essential DNA of these ecosystems that make them ‘Transformational Triggers’ and to test whether the IICC has the potential to be one such entity which will ‘Power the City’ based on the entire spectrum of projected transformations which go beyond the “legacy” impacts on the city’s fiscal reservoirs. The methodological construct of the investigation is qualified by the term C.O.EX which is comprised of three elements. The first is ‘Collate’ which will examine three precedents, comparable in scale, built within the last decade to map out the global success stories of the ‘COEX Biosphere’. The parameters for benchmarking will include the vision for the project, physical context, socio – economic context, the program brief, specific planning policies and instruments, execution modes, of the respective case examples. The second element is ‘Order’ which will apply a toolkit of parameters to measure their role as Agents of Change and how they have ‘powered the parent city’. The quantitative aspect will be plotted by measuring them with respect to indices such as footfall, revenues, contribution to GDP, job creation, spawning capital improvement and other development projects especially tourism, minimizing carbon footprint to name a few. The qualitative criteria will assess improvements in the public realm and their identity as place makers and significant civic spaces in the city, along with the content that makes them global signature icons. The final element is ‘EXtrapolate’ wherein the IICC will be tested against this toolkit and the ‘projected’ transformations will be mapped to conclude whether the COEXistence will indeed Power the City.
Keywords: COEX, Transformational, Urban triggers, Convention and Exhibition, catalysts, MICE, Parameters, tool kit.
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