Block 3: Area Data Cards: Choosing Your Chennai Neighborhood

What today is about

The unit pivots to the assessment today. Lock your area, and baseline it before you touch it.

From here on, every block feeds one piece of work. The Sustainable Neighborhood Plan is assigned today, and the first move is to choose your ground. You read the area data cards for real Chennai neighborhoods (current land-use mix, density, green-blue assets and what has been lost, flood and heat exposure, who lives there, transit access) and you lock the area you will redesign for the rest of the unit.

Then, before you change anything, you baseline it. You measure its current 15-minute access: roughly what share of homes can reach daily needs on foot today. This number is the thing your redesign has to move, and recording it now is what lets you say later "I raised access from about 40 percent to about 70 percent" instead of just "my plan is better." A plan with no baseline cannot show what it changed.

Choosing your own area is deliberate. It makes the work local and real, and it means no two plans are graded against the same easy answer. Taking an area you actually know also surfaces the human detail the data cards flatten: who walks here, who cannot, and what the neighborhood is quietly missing. That detail is what separates a generic plan from one a real planning audience would take seriously.

The exact set of Chennai neighborhoods on offer, and whether you work at the scale of a ward or a fixed 15-minute catchment, are still being finalized. Where you see a placeholder below, those specifics are coming.