Dutch practice UNStudio has unveiled a masterplan for Karle Town Centre, a garden-filled smart city in Bangalore where buildings will be covered in cooling white paint.
Karle Town Centre (KTC), which will be built alongside the Manyata Tech Park, is designed to be an attractive place for workers and their families to live in Bangalore, dubbed the Silicon Valley of India.
Buildings with distinctive rounded edges will be painted with white paint developed by UNStudio and Monopol Colors, which has been developed to reflect heat.
Called The Coolest White, the paint has been designed to help cities be more sustainable by reducing the need for air conditioning and preventing urban heat traps. Sky gardens are also planned for strategic points on the towers to provide wind breaks and shade for the streets below.
UNStudio's architecture technology company UNSense is partnering with Karle Infra, an Indian urban infrastructure development company, for the project.
Together they will embed numerous sensors into the KTC masterplan to collect data that can be used to tailor the environment to improve residents' wellbeing.
"We have so much data at our finger tips that can be used to analyse behaviour and inform design on an urban scale," said UNStudio co-founder Ben van Berkel.
"We should use this to devise urban solutions that allow us to live in healthy environments that enable social interaction and capitalise on our free time more valuably."
Traffic will be limited to certain areas of the city, with roads planned to lead to strategic drop-off points. The rest of the city will have large car-free parks and gardens designed by Amsterdam studio Baljon Landscape Architects.
Street furniture such as bollards have been designed to match the shapes of the buildings to give the KTC a unified look. This is part of an Urban Branding Manual UNStudio has devised for the masterplan.
As well as mixed-use buildings full of homes and shops, the KTC will include a theatre at its centre, as well as plazas, elevated retail areas and amphitheatre-style staircases. These are designed to be small and large scale public meeting places.
A lake front promenade is also planned to run along the shore of Nagavara Lake.
UNStudio has also masterplanned a tech-filled district in Amsterdam where residents will generate their own power, process their own waste, and learn how to manage their own data to exchange for goods and services.