Champaner-Pavagadh Archaeological Park - City Planning

City Planning

Remaining at the site are the Royal precincts within fortified walls, the entrance gate or the city gate, the mosque outside the fortifications, the royal walkway leading into the palace, and the second enclosure consisting of unexplored Jahanpanah. The urban planning of the city reveals well laid and paved streets which lead to the city centre. The residential area consists of houses of both rich and poor; rich people’s houses are built with scenic gardens and water channels. Public parks and pavilions surround the housing complex. However, temples, mosques and tombs are mostly concentrated in the Pavagarh Hills. The walk up the hill from the plains is called the Patha (pilgrim's route); considered to be the "soul of Champaner”, it has thousands of steps and is embellished with ornamental and essential structures.

Rainwater harvesting

One of the innovative features of the two historic monuments centres was the development of methods for harvesting rainwater, in the form of tanks or ponds in the Pavagadh hills (called the “hill of hundred pools”) and innumerable wells in the city of Champaran, which was nicknamed “city of thousand wells”. The Vishamitri River is the only stream that rises from the Pavgadh hills, and was tapped for feeding wells in Champaner and tanks in Pavagadh. The tanks served the pilgrims and other utilitarian, recreational, spiritual and aesthetic needs. Some of the tanks were built by constructing embankments and diverting the stored water into stone cisterns. Some of the famous water structures are: the Ganga, Yamuna and Saraswathi Kunds (in the Mauliya plateau); the Wada Talao, the largest water tank fed by rivulets located on the eastern part of the city; the innovative Gaben Shah tank; the exquisitely ornamented helical stepwells such as in the public gardens and at the entrance to the city, and the Royal summer pavilions. The water channel in the house of a noble, called the “Amir’s Manzil,” is cited as a reflection of the “superb workmanship of water structures built by those responsible for the palatine and religious architecture of Champaner.”

Read more about this topic:  Champaner-Pavagadh Archaeological Park

Famous quotes containing the words city and/or planning:

    Our purpose in founding the city was not to make any one class in it surpassingly happy, but to make the city as a whole as happy as possible.
    Socrates (469–399 B.C.)

    Most literature on the culture of adolescence focuses on peer pressure as a negative force. Warnings about the “wrong crowd” read like tornado alerts in parent manuals. . . . It is a relative term that means different things in different places. In Fort Wayne, for example, the wrong crowd meant hanging out with liberal Democrats. In Connecticut, it meant kids who weren’t planning to get a Ph.D. from Yale.
    Mary Kay Blakely (20th century)