Material Innovations

The city of Coimbatore is full of what John Thackara would call “soft assets”. It is a place enriched with cultural traditions, festivals, colors, and life. Some such festivals featured in this city include the Car festivals, which take place at the Karamadai temple, Ayudha pooja, a traditional hindu festival, and the Mariamman Festival  shown below.

Coimbatore is a thriving metropolitan city in the Southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. As a result of its flourishing industries, the city often gets it compared to Manchester, or Detroit. “The rich black soil of the region has contributed to Coimbatore’s flourishing agriculture industry and, it is in fact, the successful growth of cotton has served as a foundation for the establishment of its famous textile industry”. (http://www.coimbatore.com/general.htm)

Coimbatore, also called Kovai, is also loaded with “Hard Assets”, this includes nine different lakes and wetlands, parks, such as the VOC park, and religious places and temples, like the Perur Patteeswara Swamy Temple, the Parameswari Amman Temple, and the Marudhamalai Murugan Temple. Such assets draw people into the city and help contribute to the fact that “it is one of the top 10 fastest growing cities of India”. (http://www.coimbatorecity.com/)

When looking at images of Coimbatore, the city’s involvement in the textile industry is inherently apparent through the tradition of clothes. “The cotton textile heritage in Coimbatore dates back to Roman times; but the modern machinery seem to have made their entry in the early 1900s. A British record of 1908 which states, “It contains a steam cotton press; a cotton-spinning mill, which has 20000 spindles, employs nearly 1,000 hands daily, and turns out some 850 tons of yarn; … “ Indian apparel is doused in bright and radiating colors, ranging from farmers to shoppers, this can be seen in any image of Coimbatore. Although I have not been there (yet), the verve and genius loci of the city seems to drip from its every pores.

VIEWS OF COIMBATORE