A Place in the Sun | Phool Bagh, New MLA Quarters, Hyderabad

Winning proposal for the Phool Bagh site as part of Imagine @ Low Cost Action Lab (i’Local) – an international competition organised by Hyderabad Urban Lab in collaboration with Wipro Foundation, across 10 sites in the city.

Team
Rahul Palagani – Architect
Archana Pothina – Architect
Sasank IVS – Architect
Fereshteh Nazari – Architect
Federico Pedrazzani – Architect
Anisha Padam – Anthropologist

1. Site and everyday life
New MLA Quarters is a low-income public housing colony tucked between Hill Fort Palace, GST Bhavan and LB Stadium Road in Hyderabad. Like many similar schemes, it struggles with poor maintenance and failing basic services. Cramped buildings line narrow streets, garbage piles up in the back lanes, and small, crowded homes push daily life into the open.
Along the main road, next to Phool Bagh maidan, lies a modest leftover patch of land. It isn’t a formal park or playground, but it acts as the colony’s breathing space.
Women sit together here, talking and peeling vegetables. In the evenings, vendors park their thelas and bandis and sell vegetables to neighbours. Young girls claim corners to draw with chalk and play with stones. Goats wander through. Boys sit along the boundary wall, using it as a long bench while they watch older friends play cricket in the maidan beyond.
The same ground hosts heavier moments too. Funerals and wakes are organised here. A flag-post at the centre becomes a focus for national holidays and local celebrations. On ordinary days, leftover Ganesh idols that didn’t sell during the last festive season are stacked in a corner.
Right next to the site stands a government-run Health and Wellness Centre, and the neighbourhood has several active community associations. Within this dense public housing fabric, the patch at Phool Bagh quietly carries work and rest, play and grief, ritual, storage and access to public health – all at once.

2. A place in the sun – design intent
Our starting point was simple: the colony does not lack space; it lacks care, safety and infrastructure to support what is already happening on this ground.
The project, “a place in the sun”, treats the site not as an empty plot waiting to be designed, but as an already active commons that needs support. Instead of erasing the everyday uses, the proposal tries to strengthen them and make them more comfortable, legible and safe.
The open space is imagined as a flexible ground plane rather than a rigid park layout. The surface children already run across is reworked into a safer, more navigable place for play and informal learning. Corners where girls currently draw with chalk are thickened into smaller, more protected pockets.
The long edges, especially the boundary wall, are rethought as a continuous sequence of places to sit, wait, watch cricket, talk with neighbours or peel vegetables. Circulation remains porous so residents can drift in from the street, the maidan and the Health and Wellness Centre without feeling excluded.
Internally, we set ourselves a brief: make the space safer for children and youth without pushing anyone else out. Safety here is understood as visibility, comfort and shared ownership – not fences and segregation.

3. A flexible, dynamic and inclusive framework
The architectural intervention is conceived as a light framework that amplifies what the ground is already doing. The design is flexible, dynamic and inclusive, tuned to existing activities: boys watching cricket, girls claiming corners, vendors setting up for the evening, women gossiping, neighbours gathering for funerals or political meetings.
Play, exchange and congregation are not separated into neat zones. They are treated as overlapping conditions that slide into one another through the day. The framework gives these uses shade, structure and recognisable form while keeping room for improvisation.
Scaffolding as structure
The main built element is an incremental framework of modular scaffolding cubes.

At the centre of the site, the ground is shaped as an inward-looking loitering space for elders, women, men and children – a shared “room” without hard walls. Along one edge, a linear chain of cubes creates shaded areas to sit, play, talk, sell goods or simply linger.

Some cubes are wrapped in textiles; others are left open. Surfaces and attachments can be added or removed as needed – for drying clothes, hanging swings, growing creepers, or setting up temporary screens and displays. Rather than a finished object, the structure acts as a tool the community can keep modifying over time.

Trees, wall, water

Existing trees are treated as key actors in the design, their shade and presence shaping the layout. The boundary wall becomes a spine: in some stretches it supports smaller “rooms”, in others it opens up to form longer, continuous spaces.

A portion of the wall is demolished to increase porosity between the site and the playground; the resulting debris is reused in the project. The material palette stays modest and repairable: scaffolding, wooden pallet boards, textiles, natural stone and earthen finishes.

One important move is the relocation of the water collection point from the street into the site itself. This allows people to sit, wait, chat and loiter around water in relative safety and shade, instead of standing on a busy edge.

Method

The design process is anchored in participant observation, ethnography and semi-structured interviews, treating residents as co-authors rather than just “users”. The spatial framework is intended to be easy to understand, build and adapt by the community itself, cultivating a sense of collective ownership.

4. What can a cube do? What can a cluster do?

At the heart of the project is a simple modular cube made from old scaffolding pipes. Scaffolding is familiar to local contractors, widely available and easy to assemble and repair, making it a pragmatic core for a low-cost action lab.

The cube is a flexible frame. Within the same outline, it can become:

a shaded corner for children

a small platform for sitting and gossip

a stall for vendors

a tiny performance nook

a water station

a place to hang clothes or store items

By keeping the structure light and open, surfaces and fabrics can change with seasons, events and needs.

From unit to neighbourhood

Once the basic unit is defined, the design thinks in clusters.

Cubes can:

line up to form a long shaded edge

bend into a corner

gather around a central void

step up into a loose platform

Grouped together, they generate a sequence of thresholds, small rooms, stages and hangouts that remain visually open. Children can move from cube to cube like a simple play structure. Vendors can temporarily occupy a stretch and then recede. Families can reconfigure fabric panels, benches and tabletops for gatherings, prayers or meetings.

The cluster is never fully fixed; it is a grammar that residents can keep revising as funds, labour and needs evolve.

Phool Bagh, and beyond

The cube system is tailored to the routines of New MLA Quarters, but it is intentionally generic enough to travel. Using common materials – scaffolding, pallet boards, textiles – it can be built by local fabricators in other dense neighbourhoods, scaled up or down, stretched along a street or wrapped around existing trees.

At Phool Bagh, the cubes respond to cricket, chalk games, vegetable carts, wakes and national days. Elsewhere, they might host tailoring work, shared study spaces, tea stalls or after-school classes.

The ambition is not to export a finished architectural object, but to share a simple, legible system that different communities can claim, adapt and rewrite in their own ways.