Bhubaneswar,December 15: At least 30 public spaces across the Temple City donned appealing look under the Bhubaneswar Public Spaces (BPS) initiative of the Bhubaneswar Development Authority (BDA).

The development authority under involved 100 architecture students from different institutions in and around the city to design the 30 public spaces across the city.

The project included spaces such as under flyover space, plazas at major junctions, underutilized spaces along roads, entry plazas to the public buildings such as State Museums, etc. These spaces typically lacked pedestrian safety, cleanliness and were mostly encroached by unauthorised street vendors, in addition to basic sanitation and cleanliness issues.

The objective of this project was to work with the locals who use the space on a day-to-day basis such as residents, authorized vendors and city authorities who maintain the space such as Traffic Police and Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC).

Extremely challenging, the designing of these spaces primarily focused on reclaiming the space from the vehicles, heaps of garbage, unorganized street-vendors and make the space available for the citizens in form of a free, easy accessible and safe, well-lit public space.

Few of the projects also focused on improving the geometric designs of the junctions. The BDA urban planners also assisted in the implementation undertaken by BMC and other city agencies.

For example, the BDA Frontage project under BPS used underutilized space, predominantly used for two-wheeler parking and after the intervention, space is transformed into clean, well-lit and landscaped public space, with clear segregation between two-wheeler parking and pedestrians with built-in seating.