News & Notes 917:Update on l'Avenir d'Auroville / ATDC
Update on Entity::l'Avenir d'Auroville / ATDC
Dear Residents of Auroville,
we are restructuring l’Avenir d’Auroville/ Auroville Town Development Council in order for us to meet the requirements of a planning office capable of building the City of Auroville, to become a professional office having effective technical teams that can realise the building of Mother’s City as per the Galaxy Plan and Master Plan.
This is an important change of its functioning, as, compared to the past decades, the pace of the work needs to speed up immensely as must its quality increase.
Practically this means that the technical teams will be expanded and the planning office will take up more space in the ACUR building. We have engaged many people for the technical team both from inside and outside Auroville. When our teams are complete we will publish a list of names of those who work at ATDC and an updated list of members.
ATDC will focus on many things including planning, development of Urban Design Guidelines for every sector/zone, creation of DDPs with internal teams and external consultants, preparation of projects, implementation and monitoring of projects, surveys and mapping, resource mobilisation and much more.
While we are doing so, almost all of our time is taken up by making sure we first and foremost get settled in a new way of functioning. A lot of personal requests for buildings, extensions and renovations are reaching us, and we understand that some of you have been waiting for several weeks/months. We are attending to these individual applications in the midst of this bigger work for the building of the City which, at the moment, takes precedence over everything else.
We are undertaking in the near future several surveys in the city area and the green belt; we thank Aurovilians in advance for allowing our ground team to do their job.
Here are some updates on some topics:
- Some requests for individual houses and extensions are presently on hold, as the DDP only can show where development is in line with the Master Plan. Those applications which are on hold will be communicated individually.
- As part of the Master Plan implementation, we are working on opening up Residential Zone Sectors 1 and 2 for new residential projects of varying densities, along with some projects that will be located in outside Master Plan areas where land and infrastructure are available. If you are already on the list with Housing Service, then you will be contacted when a corresponding project starts. We request people with Project Holder capacities to write to ATDC as we are currently forming a pool of Project Managers that can help with various aspects of realising the projects in these 2 sectors.
- We know that many people are requesting stewardship agreements for the houses that were built without any NOC’s or approvals. The fact that this unclarity exists is part of the need for restructuring and a full clean-up of ATDC’s records. We will not be issuing retroactive NOCs for the assets built without NOC. Once we have the base map and the corresponding information fully updated, these old issues will be looked into and dealt with case by case.
- The ATDC has together with the Auroville Foundation approved 4 special projects as priority projects: Morning Star, Mother’s Flower Garden, Svaram Musical Research Centre and The Sprout. More information will be published shortly as and when available to us.
We are grateful and immensely happy to finally have a real impetus to realise Mother’s City, and hope that all of us are enjoying this beautiful development.
Sincerely, Lieve,
for ATDC