MUCP Design Portfolio

About IMUCP

IMUCP is part of the MUCP course, which is a full-year academic course open to undergraduate students in their final year from all U of T faculties, departments and campuses.

Students are placed in multidisciplinary teams and matched with a community partner that has identified an existing urban challenge that they would like the students to consult on. Over the course of the academic year, teams research, propose, and ultimately prototype an intervention to address this challenge.

IMUCP Cohort 2024 on the Last Day of Field Trip

About The Project - Repurposing Areas Under Flyovers in Pune, India

Urban flyovers are typically constructed to solve mobility challenges in rapidly growing cities. However, the spaces beneath these structures often become neglected, underutilized, or misused, thus becoming urban voids. Our community partner, RannNiti, has identified through their preliminary research that these spaces present both a challenge and an opportunity for the urban realm. Thus, our collaboration aims to exploit this potential by reimagining these voids as dynamic, multifunctional public spaces.

RannNiti is a multidisciplinary impact and design agency, which works with changemakers from the development, public and legislative sectors in the capacity of impact advisors. Our partnership was focused on understanding local context and creating a mutually viable solution that can be replicated within Pune and outside of it.

Guided by a field visit in October 2024, coupled with stakeholder interviews and desktop research, we developed a website guide for creating safe, and inclusive public spaces. It includes an overview of urban voids, case studies from global contexts, and a comprehensive framework that addresses stakeholder engagement, design alternatives, and effective governance. Our deliverable aims to foster community collaboration, municipal awareness, and local entrepreneurship, hence contributing to the broader urban fabric of Pune.

I demonstrated initiative in getting the group to start thinking about our final deliverable output.
In the early weeks of the project before our field trip, I leveraged on my background in GIS and mapping to kickstart initial discussion within the group on the type of output that we should produce. This was done by using Python to extract spatial data about locations of flyovers as well as locations of various amenities, and I shared with them my initial findings. This was meant to provide a visual reference for the group to decide where a suitable flyover revitalisation project could take place and what purposes or amenities should be there in order to make the best use of the space.

I displayed adaptability when faced with new obstacles that were previously not accounted for.
As we were suggested the Paud Road Flyover during the field trip, we realised that it was unfeasible to suggest a specific intervention for the space. This was due to the relatively small space under the flyover - presenting physical restrictions - on top of our relatively short time on-the-ground, the fact that none of our group members are residents of Pune, and that we possessed neither engineering nor architectural expertise between the group and our community partner. I recognised that we need to adapt our project's direction if we wanted to complete the project and address our community partner's problem statement effectively. Hence, after initial discussions with another teammate, Jake Karpouzis, we proposed to the group for the project to pivot towards a broader approach of creating a website guide that RannNiti could refer to and establish the right processes that includes the community to revitalise the spaces under flyovers in Pune, India.

Flyover Revitalisation Project Team on Last Day of Field Trip

Discussing with RannNiti during the Field Trip

Minutes for a Meeting Done after a Snowstorm in February 2025

I applied my knowledge of HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create the case studies map for our website guide.
I took the opportunity to apply web map development skills learnt from another course to present the case studies interactively. This is in contrast to simply presenting location features via photos and static maps that have been featured in similar guides. The code used to develop the website can be found here. While I was responsible for coding, I also partook in literature review of the case studies alongside Jake in looking up details about the case studies, forming the textual and visual content on the dynamic left panel of the website. Even though the case studies map is developed separately from the main website guide (which relies on Canva's website builder), I opted to streamline the design of the case studies webpage to match the website guide's webpage deisign as much as possible.

I leveraged on my research and inference skills as well as knowledge of a different language to author Framework Part 3: Governing Space of our website guide.
As a natural extension of the research on case studies, I opted to write the section that discusses sustainable governance of the space after it has been activated. This section is largely missing from general current literature on revitalising urban voids of various kinds. Additionally, when looking at each case study, the details on how the space is governed is not easily available either. For example, the governance of Taman Film in Bandung, Indonesia, is not available in English, but rather in Bahasa Indonesia. Thus, to complete this section, I was required to connect research about the specific case studies to the circumstancial information about how public spaces in those municipalities are governed, sometimes across different languages, such as for Taman Film.

International Multidisciplinary Urban Capstone Project (IMUCP)

Muhammad Khalis' Design Portfolio

About IMUCP

About The Project - Repurposing Areas Under Flyovers in Pune, India

My Contributions

Reflections