Restore + Connect + Engage

Problem

Chennai’s lakes — Velachery, Adambakkam, Perumbakkam, and Madambakkam among them — are threatened by sewage, waste, encroachment, and unplanned development, even though they sit at the center of the Chennai Metropolitan Area’s southward growth along the GST and OMR corridors. Treating them as leftover water bodies rather than infrastructure was the problem; the competition brief asked for a systems approach that could rejuvenate all four as one connected asset rather than four separate cleanup projects.

Approach

As design assistant, visualization lead, and analytics coordinator, I led 3D massing in SketchUp for perspective collages and detailed axonometric views, and supported the analysis team in validating the technical datasets — urban growth, street network, transit and walkability, topography, natural drainage, and green cover — that the framework is built on.

The baseline scans behind the framework.
Source	Product	Access
Urban growth & accessibility scan	Growth corridors, street network, transit and walkability around each lake	Team-compiled from municipal and OSM sources
Environmental & hydro-ecological scan	Topography, natural drainage, green cover across the Pallikaranai basin/watershed	Team-compiled GIS analysis

The proposal organizes every intervention under three verbs: restore, by improving water quality, storage capacity, and groundwater infiltration and providing habitat for native species; connect, by making the lakefront publicly accessible and linked to sustainable mobility; and engage, by ensuring the lakes’ sustainability through community buy-in, local stewardship, and culturally meaningful interaction with water.

Results

Velachery Lakefront is the framework’s pilot — positioned as resilient community infrastructure that mitigates flooding through stormwater management while advancing a circular economy through waste, food, and energy management, integrating urban agriculture, solid-waste management, and street vending into the same lakefront promenade.

Detailed illustrated plan of the Velachery lakefront with a numbered legend of 17 elements across three zones: an eight-item lakefront promenade (wetland edge treatment, pedestrian zone, on-street parking, bioswale, vending zone, viewing decks, public park, shared lane), a seven-item community lakefront (open space, agriculture, retention pond, horticulture, waste collection, DEWATS, biogas plant), and a two-item integrated community waste centre and agro-park, with a Phase I construction zone marked at the northern road crossing. — 17 numbered interventions, phased — Phase I is already marked on the plan, not a someday aspiration. The waste centre and agro-park sit directly against the promenade, not off to one side.Source: Professional Portfolio - Abdul Kalam 10MB.pdf, p. 30.

Full-bleed aerial rendering of southern Chennai showing Madambakkam, Perumbakkam, Adambakkam, and Velachery lakes connected by a continuous yellow eco-loop trail, passing an eco-research area, biodiversity interpretation point, lakefront nature trail, sponge streets along the 200ft Radial Road, and a central green reserve near Guindy National Park, with Pallikaranai Marsh and the Bay of Bengal in the distance. — The four lakes read as one system once the eco-loop connects them — the same move as the Adyar Basin vision, applied at the scale of a lake network instead of a river.Source: Professional Portfolio - Abdul Kalam 10MB.pdf, p. 31.

Winner, Chennai Lakefront Rejuvenation Competition, Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority, 2023.

What I’d do differently

The framework is explicit about Phase I at Velachery but doesn’t state how the other three lakes sequence relative to it or to each other. A cross-lake prioritization — by flood risk reduction per rupee, the same logic the Adyar Basin evaluation matrix used — would turn four independent lake plans into one investable programme.

Problem

Approach

Results

What I’d do differently

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