Bhadra Square - Ahmedabad

Bhadra FortからTeen Darwazaの間に広がる細長い広場。15世紀にAhmed Shahにより城塞が建設された際に作られた広場を起源としています。当時は、フルーツの木が植えられ、日陰が広がっていたようですが、現在では、樹木はあまりない、近代的な広場となっています。 広場は市場としても使われており、昼ごろから徐々に店が増え、夕方には衣料品や装飾品を中心とした無数のお店が広場中に広がります。私が行ったときは象がいました。少しお金を払えば触ることも可能です。

Bhadra place ....... My shop here.......

Nice

This old market of Amdavad reminds you a bit of Harappa and Mohenjo Daro! But trust me when I say you can find almost everything under the sun for sale here at probably the cheapest prices, but the quality cannot be guaranteed!

This historic square is surrounded by landmarks such as The Bhadra Mataji temple, Teen Darwaza, and a popular place for hawkers!! Recently paved and upgraded! AMTS has started free bus service from this square to Kalupur Railway station.

It is one of the large scape open space in middle of the densely crowded and populated area surrounded with monumental historical structures and couple of newly designed structures by prominent architects. It used to be very lively area with two large densely vegetated islands with historically prominent structures. It was a relieve space surrounded by densely crowded bazars and also connecting space for largest mass transportation system of the Ahmedabad city-the Lal Darwaja station. After Bhadra Plaza Development Project by Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation it has lost its character and its importance to connect the surrounded bursting bazars with local residential areas and restricted the easy flow of the movements by locals and visitors which was pivotal to the local economy of the markets and surrounded small scale business areas. This is a best example of the dictatorial decisions taken by the municipalities for their political interest. The large scale investment and the efforts to design and promote is get vested as we experience the plaza today. There was no community outreach program and having a healthy dialog with local people and business owners. There are also some bold disruptive decisions taken by extending the Bhadra temple plaza in to the public space which directly fight with the sense of secular open space for public and cordoned off fenced small plaza within the plaza with marbled flooring…! It is not only an example of the imposing the new space which is not demanded by the local way of life-movements and the character of the historical significant monuments. Plaza also surrounded by heavily guarded massive gates to all the entry points to the plaza which restricts not only the local vehicular movement by local residences who lived there for generations but it also restricted the ease of doing a business by customers. The plaza get cleaned once in a while to show its design intent just to show off to the prominent visitors like team of the World Heritage Organization while issuing the certificate…. The intended short term character or the plaza do get replaced by the highly crowded and unorganized chaos by local hawkers and unauthorized shops with the nexus of the local law enforcement administration and municipality.