The Nano City is a project initiated by Sabeer Bhatia, the co-founder of Hotmail, whose company, Nano Works Developers Private Limited, commissioned a team of faculty and students at UC Berkeley to design the master plan for a sustainable city in the northern Indian region of Haryana.
“I was surprised by the quality of work (by the team),” Bhatia said during the event. “It has been an incredible learning experience.”
Nezar Alsayyad, a professor of architecture, co-directed the commission and oversaw the completion of the master plan by a group of undergraduate and graduate students in the College of Environmental Design, said Stefan Al, the design coordinator of the commission and a graduate student in the city and regional planning department.
Al said the collaboration began as a research expedition, hosted by Bhatia and composed of 16 students and six faculty, to a site in northern India this spring to come up with design plans for the project.
After the trip, the faculty members divided students into groups to compete for the best master plan, as an assignment for the Nano City Super Studio course, he said.
Bhatia then commissioned a few students, including Al, to continue working on the urban plan for Nano City this summer, Al said.
The final team, called the Berkeley Group for Architecture and Planning, completed the first stage of the city plan over the summer, designing 120 acres of the 11,000-acre region belonging to the city, he said.
The team also created a four-minute animation and a model, which were shown during the event.
Bhatia said he chose UC Berkeley over other universities because the campus has the resources available for the project to become a reality.
“I was very impressed by the breadth and diversity of interdisciplinary experiences at Berkeley,” Bhatia said.
Alsayyad said Bhatia is in the process of purchasing the site in northern India, and that the actual construction of the self-sufficient city will begin in 2009.
He said an important part of the commission was that participants come from different departments, including architecture and urban design, among others, and that the faculty members were responsible not only for teaching the students, but also for including them in a professional project.
“(My goal is) not only what (the students) learned but that what they produced (at) a small budget is infinitely better than what an architecture firm could do for $1 million,” Alsayyad said.