Özet:

Over the last few decades, urban centers have experienced a steady environmental degradation, contributing to an overall lack of comfort in them. Kolkata, a prime urban megalopolis in the Eastern Gangetic plain of India, is no exception to this phenomenon. In today’s city-centric development, urban centres have turned into heat sinks. This rise in temperature is instigating the citizens to use more of mechanical cooling devices, which in turn increase the external temperature by throwing out the inner heat of the building outside, thus creating an endless cycle. Sustainable development approaches of Smart City initiative have recently encouraged planners and architects alike to think and act in order to break this cyclic climatic degradation. The first part of the paper intends to inspect these critical climatic conditions on a tangible measurable platform, thus establishing the need for a planned intervention into it. This paper then intends to tap a non-conventional solution to the problem. It hypothesizes the comparative supremacy of old indigenous buildings of the existing urban fabric of Kolkata over its newer buildings, and then inspects and tests the hypothesis through climatic measurements carried out in both indigenous and newer buildings. Analysis and inferences drawn from the climatic measurements would prove the hypothesis to be right or wrong. If the supremacy of indigenous structures is proven, it would then be the onus on the lawmakers to incorporate the unique design inputs of the old buildings into the newer architecture judicially in order to achieve a better thermal performance of the latter.

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