Designing the Ephemeral: What Mahakumbh Teaches Us About Cities of the Future

Overview:

What if the future of cities lies not in permanence, but in the ability to adapt, assemble, and unbuild? The Mahakumbh—a city of tents that rises, functions, and disappears within months—offers radical lessons in designing for uncertainty. With its responsive infrastructure, modular systems and people-first planning, this temporary city challenges conventional ideas of urban development. In a world of crises, displacement and shifting geographies, it invites urban designers, planners and educators to rethink architecture and interior design as tools for resilience—not just permanence.

Table of contents

• From Shelter to System: The Tent as Urban Living Element
• How to Build—and Unbuild—a City
• Designing for Density and Uncertainty
• Designing for Disparity: Class, Crowds and the Challenge of Adaptability
• Designing for Density: What Cities Can Learn from Kumbh
• Digital Kumbh: Tech Experiments at Urban Scale
• Impermanence as Urban Intelligence

As the world faces escalating ecological and humanitarian crises, the idea of what defines a city is undergoing a radical transformation. Permanence—once the cornerstone of urban planning—is no longer a given. Today’s designers are forced to confront a volatile future. One where the ability to adapt might matter more than the ability to endure.

Over the last two centuries, urban populations have surged from 3% to 55%. By 2050, the UN projects two-thirds of 10 billion people will live in cities. But what kind of cities? And who are they built for?

With three out of five major cities now at high risk from natural disasters—and over a billion people living in informal or self-built settlements—the frameworks that once defined our urban environments are becoming obsolete. Add to this the rising tide of war and forced displacement, and it’s clear: architecture can no longer afford to build only for stability. It must build for uncertainty.

From Shelter to System: The Tent as Urban Living Element

In A Manifesto for Tents and Flexible Cities, architects Felipe Vera and Rahul Mehrotra propose that the tent—lightweight, modular and deployable—is more than a temporary shelter. It’s a radical metaphor for the future of cities: fast, flexible and human-centered.

Across contexts—from UNHCR’s emergency deployments to the Serpentine Pavilion’s architectural provocations—the tent has emerged as both a literal and symbolic response to a world in flux. These ephemeral structures challenge the rigidity of concrete grids, offering instead a vision of urbanism built on adaptability, resilience and the human scale.

Nowhere is this more vividly realized than at the Kumbh Mela. Every twelve years, an ordinary riverbank is transformed into one of the largest cities on Earth—an entire urban organism erected, inhabited by millions and then purposefully dismantled within months. A city that rises from dust, adapts to shifting terrains and surging crowds, then quietly disappears. No concrete. No legacy. Just systems that learn, and people who move.

This tented city becomes a living case study in responsive urbanism. It adapts to terrain, time and population—factors that most permanent cities struggle to accommodate. What makes it so compelling is the scale and complexity achieved in an incredibly short span. Beyond its spiritual weight, the Mahakumbh offers something else: a model for cities of crisis. In an age of mass displacement, climate volatility, and fractured geographies, could this temporary city offer permanent lessons? How can design education respond to these evolving urban futures?

How to Build—and Unbuild—a City

Unlike conventional cities, where urban planning takes shape over decades, the Kumbh is assembled in just 5-6 months.  An entire infrastructure of roads, bridges, sanitation systems and temporary housing is constructed to support tens of millions. Instead, the city is built on experience and iteration. Each iteration builds on the last—drawing on lived experience, institutional knowledge, and on-ground feedback. The tent, here, is more than shelter—it’s the basic architectural unit of the city and a symbol of agility. Reused fabrics, modular frames and community-based layouts form a resilient, responsive grid.

This is a lesson in interior architecture and design at urban scale—how spatial configurations, material decisions, and human-centric planning can deliver both form and function, however temporary.

Teams from multiple departments—public works, sanitation, police and religious councils—collaborate in a uniquely Indian version of inter-agency coordination.

- Lakhs of tents are pitched in precise grids.

- Temporary electrical poles power camps.

- Water pipelines, toilets, signage, mobile clinics and crowd-control barricades appear almost overnight.

- Once the pilgrims depart, the entire city is dismantled with equal swiftness, returning the land to its original riverbed state.

Unlike permanent cities, which struggle to retrofit their rigid structures, the Kumbh is built for adaptation. The modular design of roads and public services ensures rapid setup and teardown. This has real-world applications. Take the pontoon bridges: temporary floating structures assembled by the army’s engineering units and PWD teams. 

Each bridge uses interconnected metal buoys anchored to the riverbed, topped with wooden planks or metal sheets to form a stable deck for pedestrian and light vehicular traffic. Their modular nature allows for quick deployment, realignment, or dismantling based on changing river conditions or crowd pressures—making them critical to a festival defined by movement and flux.

Table: Comparative analysis of conventional cities versus the tented city of Kumbh

Planning the Kumbh is an exercise in extreme urban responsiveness. Population densities fluctuate by the hour. Sanitation must be delivered for millions. Routes must adapt in real time. Every edition becomes a live testbed—of massive crowd management, infrastructure resilience and design agility with almost no margin for error. 

Each iteration builds on the past experience. Urban planners, policymakers and designers have begun studying the Kumbh as a model for temporary settlements—whether for refugee camps, disaster relief zones or mass gatherings. Its ability to function as a full-fledged city, despite its impermanence, makes it a rare and invaluable case study in adaptive urbanism. 

This raises an important question: in times of climate displacement, mass migration, or crisis, could this tent-based thinking hold the blueprint for a more humane, responsive urbanism?

Designing for Density and Uncertainty

The scale of Mahakumbh 2025 was staggering:

• A 10,000-acre temporary city accommodating 40 crore pilgrims over 45 days.
• 150,000+ tents, 4700 acres of parking space, 30 pontoon bridges, 92+ roads in grid planning and 400+ km of roads.
• A digital command center monitoring crowd movements through 2,750 cameras.
• 11 hospitals, sanitation for millions and 23 permanent security checkpoints

Designing for Disparity: Class, Crowds and the Challenge of Adaptability

Perhaps nothing embodies the Kumbh’s design dualities better than the tent. It becomes a unifying design element—one that carries radically different meanings. For sadhus and pilgrims, tents are spiritual shelters, often makeshift, simplistic offering basic shelter. For luxury-seeking visitors, they’re air-conditioned, amenity-rich enclosures curated by travel companies. Both are temporary. Both vanish after 45 days. 

Yet, within that short lifespan, they mirror the class-based spatial inequalities found in permanent cities—where zoning, income and access shape everything from amenities to air quality. At the Kumbh, it all unfolds on the same floodplain, just in different enclosures.

In this way, the tent becomes more than a shelter. It is a pliable design system—able to respond to divergent needs, reflect social hierarchies, and accommodate vastly different expectations within the same urban framework. It offers what most conventional cities struggle to: the capacity to redesign space for function, faith, or comfort on demand. From bridges and roads to beds and thatch mats, the Kumbh’s design operates at both macro and micro scales—each critical to the city’s temporary life.

But adaptability has its limits. This year’s Mauni Amavasya witnessed an overwhelming surge of pilgrims, testing the resilience of even the most carefully coordinated systems. Despite extensive planning, infrastructure buckled under pressure—a reminder that scale and unpredictability remain design’s most unforgiving tests.

In a world where mass gatherings, displacement and spontaneous mobilisations are increasingly common, this raises a critical question: How do we design spaces that can absorb such fluctuations without breaking down?

Designing for Density: What Cities Can Learn from Kumbh

Managing millions is a design challenge.The Mahakumbh doesn’t just accommodate millions—it manages them with precision. Its layered crowd control systems, real-time monitoring and zoned movement strategies offer valuable lessons for urban transit and crisis infrastructure.

As crowd management expert Dr. Pushpendra Singh notes, “Many Indian cities lack real-time pedestrian flow monitoring. The Kumbh’s ability to respond to density surges should inform urban transit hubs and public spaces.”

Take Mumbai’s railway stations, where overcrowding is a daily crisis. Lessons from the Kumbh—like segregated entry/exit routes, dynamic rerouting, and control rooms powered by real-time data—could help manage bottlenecks more intelligently.  The question is whether permanent ones are willing to adopt them.

Digital Kumbh: Tech Experiments at Urban Scale

This year’s Kumbh became a live testing ground for smart-city interventions. A 60,000-square-foot Digital Experience Centre layered mythology with laser projections and holograms. A custom-built app provided real-time navigation, updates, and safety advisories. Surveillance drones and AI-powered crowd analytics tracked movement flows, feeding data into a control center designed to respond to surges instantly.

From 50 lakh attendees in 1954 to over 66 crore in 2025, the Kumbh’s exponential growth has turned it into a high-pressure model for managing hyper-dense, temporary urban populations. In many ways, it mirrors the goals of smart cities: real-time responsiveness, crowd control, and tech-enabled public services—except condensed into 45 days on shifting floodplains.

But this convergence of faith and data raises critical questions for urban design:

Can cities of the future be both digitally intelligent and deeply human? Can systems built for control still allow for spontaneity, collective memory, and cultural expression?

Impermanence as Urban Intelligence

The Kumbh offers a radical lesson: that cities don’t have to be permanent to be powerful. While the world’s fastest-growing urban centers—Delhi, Lagos, São Paulo—build outward in concrete and steel, often ignoring collapse or change, the Kumbh embraces impermanence as a strength.

What if we designed cities with the same mindset? As responsive assemblies—not fixed monuments. As places that flex with time, need and uncertainty.

The Mahakumbh is more than a pilgrimage—it’s a model for cities in flux. Its tented grid offers a functional blueprint for war zones, climate-displaced settlements, and temporary urban expansions. In a world shaped by crisis and migration, this adaptability is no longer optional—it’s essential.

As architect Rahul Mehrotra reminds us, “No building, no road, no garden is permanent... The act of creation must necessarily be complemented by the act of letting go.” The Kumbh challenges the dominant idea of a city. It dares us to imagine urbanism as rhythm—as something that assembles, adapts, disappears and begins again.

Explore More About Design 

- Did this piece offer a fresh lens on urban design? Explore more by author Ridhima, including her take on seven compelling examples of visual communication in design.

- As a new-age design school, IIAD helps you build critical skills to think beyond the brief—nurturing the next-gen of design entrepreneurs. Explore how. 

- Curious how spaces speak? Faculty member and architect Madhu Pandit shares insights on reading and reimagining spaces—shaped by years of adaptive reuse and global practice.