Project by Neha Sarah Abraham @n3haabraham
The Maldives is globally imagined as a paradise of leisure, yet beneath this image lies a spatial and economic imbalance where tourism-driven wealth coexists with ecological strain, national debt, and limited local access to infrastructure and leisure. Focusing on the Malé - Hulhumalé corridor, this project exposes how flows of tourists, labour, and resources systematically bypass local life within one of the most densely engineered yet uneven territories in the archipelago. Through on-site mapping, spatial analysis, and design strategies that operate through conditions of flux, it reveals a tightly interlinked system of environmental degradation, economic leakage, and labour extraction. Rather than treating these conditions as isolated crises, the project intentionally reframes them as sites of potential. It proposes adaptive, locally grounded interventions, including coastal buffers, salt-based economies, and community infrastructures that transform existing systems into productive, accessible, and resilient spatial frameworks. The impact lies in redefining leisure as a shared right, restoring local agency, and repositioning the corridor as a space of collective use, production, and environmental coexistence.
