July 8th, 2010 by Kavya
The Delhi Urban Platform and the Goethe-Institut invite you to an open discussion-
Ecology of Fragments
6:00 P.M., 15th July 2010
Max Mueller Bhavan
3, Kasturba Gandhi Marg
Delhi- 110 001
The ecology of the city is changing rapidly in complex ways. It is impossible to capture this moment completely. In nature, as in human societies, altering any part of the ecology of an interdependent networked relationship impacts every other part in the system. In this process, many precious elements can ‘disappear,’ and become absent. They are apparent to us only as a ‘lack,’ or absence and gradually, over time. While nature evolves through a constant struggle and adaptation, with each micro niche being fragile and sustainable, there is no single predicted meta outcome, only a constant change. On the other hand, the change in our cities seems to be driven through imaginations which are fixed and pre-decided by capital and social power. Nothing else which could be termed human seems to matter anymore.
‘Absences,’ can be fragmented and dispersed, and not always visible. They are also markers of the forces behind the change. For example, has the concretisation of every green patch, lead to the disappearance of the house sparrow, or has the conservation of monuments meant that the city has no street performers any more? Will the river once cleaned, kill itself, or is the cleaner city leading more marginalized lives? Maybe it is time we think of ‘ecology’ not only in terms of ‘functionality’ (is a tree more useful than a building) and ‘aesthetics,’ (is a tree more beautiful than a building), but in terms of dominance and loss. Maybe this is what this moment is all about.
Speakers:
Ravi Agarwal: An Ecology of Fragments
Sohail Hashmi: Traditional water systems of Delhi
Anand Vivek Taneja: Monuments as living entities
Shashi Pandit: Wastepickers and new marginalisations in privatisation.
Manoj Mishra: The river as an eco-system, not merely a water channel.
(Chaired and moderated by Ravi Agarwal)
May 28th, 2010 by Kavya
The Delhi Urban Platform invites you to
Reporting Delhi: Media Journalism and the City
5:00 P.M., Saturday, 29th May 2010
Seminar Room, Sarai-CSDS
The last two decades have witnessed a fundamental transformation of the city, and previous modes of inhabiting and apprehending the urban experience in India. The contemporary city is characterized by a new visual landscape marked by the proliferation of visual signage, an increasingly dense media landscape composed of the internet, 24 hour news television, satellite TV, and a massive expansion of telecommunications. Accompanying this has also been an increasing sense of the urban as a fraught terrain. In the case of Delhi, – from bombs in marketplaces, to the everyday violence of demolition and construction, from pitched battles over resources and claims on city space, to the increasing policing and surveillance of everyday life by the state – the city seems to exist in a state of permanent crises. The media are inextricably enmeshed in this process. We witness an event almost before it occurs. From sting operations to the continual relay of images of a communal riot, the flooding of newspaper pages and TV screens of images of caught “terrorists” to the glitter of new spaces of leisure and consumption, the media actively produce the dread and exhilaration that accompany living in our cities.
This saturday we invite journalists Aanchal Bansal (city reporter for the Indian Express), Aman Sethi (who used to report on labour in Delhi for the Frontline magazine), Rahul Tripathi (crime reporter for the Times of India), Mihir Sharma, Pradip Saha (former editor Down to Earth magazine) and Manisha Sethi (teacher at Jamia and has closely followed media reporting on “terror”) to reflect on the role of journalistic practice as a site where the city is reported on, but also written into being. Join us for an open, and animated conservation with:
Mihir Sharma (The Indian Express)
Aman Sethi (The Hindu)
Aanchal Bansal (The Indian Express)
Pradeep Saha (Former Editor, Down to Earth)
Rahul Tripathi (The Times of India)
Manisha Sethi (Jamia Millia Islamia)
March 11th, 2010 by Aarti
11th March at the Khoj Studios
5.30 pm: Walk through of SEZ Who? a collaborative project by Tushar Joag, Sharmila Samant, Prajakta Potnis, Justin Ponmany and Uday Shanbag.
SEZ Who? Is the outcome of a fact finding exercise conducted at two areas adjacent to Bombay: The Gorai Uttan Belt and the Raigad District. Special Economic Zones were proposed at these locations and met with severe opposition from the local populace. The installation/ events that will unfold at The Khoj Studios is a way of cataloging the data (gathered from the numerous trips) creatively and to share the story which is actually just the tip of the iceberg. The Studio spaces will change constantly till the closing at of the project.
6.30pm: SEMINAR: (in collaboration with the Delhi Urban Platform) examining issues around urban development, the politics of land usage and sustainability
Speakers:
Praful Bidwai
Manshi Asher
Navjot Altaf & Ajay Mahajan
Arunav Dasgupta
moderated by Shuddhabrata Sengupta
8.00pm: Performance by Han Bing
March 2nd, 2010 by Kavya
Two autos and a long conversation with the auto wallah on the way to the Indian Social Institute, on Friday, the 26th of February. Going past dug up roads around the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium that is mid-make over, I remembered how three years ago the maidan next to Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium was the location for the India Social Forum- when the streets around it were smattered with garbage, open drains, small slum clusters, the general air of neglect and decrepitude hanging low and heavy. Now, of course, the neglect has morphed into attention, but of a very particular kind. The garbage has been cleaned up around the nullah, and the denizens beyond the shadow of the stadium are nowhere to be seen. Beyond the gravel and cement heaps rise the structure and symbolism of Delhi’s projected future, the skeleton of the steel stadia, looming large.
And while looking at this, stuck in the traffic jam, the auto wallah was explaining to me the logic of ‘Smart Cards’ that all auto-drivers were having to get from the Government around Holi this year- granted on the basis of one auto per owner, stamped, signed, approved by the Government. Pleased that he no longer had anything to do with contractors and kirayi, and happy that he was the validated, stamped and approved owner of his second-hand auto of two lakhs, the auto wallah left me at my destination.
With entirely apposite thoughts, I blundered into second session of the Platform, on ‘Transport and the City’. I walked in on time to hear Madhu Kishwar’s impassioned sarcasm about the MCD’s socialistic sounding aphorisms: “land to the tiller, rickshaw to the puller”, with the residue of my previous conversation still fresh in mind.
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February 26th, 2010 by Aarti
4:00 P.M., 26th February 2010
Room 413, Indian Social Institute, Lodhi Road
Transport is central to the life of all metropolises, and in the past few years, mobility, organisation and control of the street have been central motifs of debates on the city. With the highest number of private car ownership, the highest accident mortality rates of any city in India, the question of how transport is to be organized has become a pressing and crucial question in Delhi. From bitter fights over the introduction of CNG, to campaigns in the press against the introduction of the Bus Rapid Transit system, who controls and accesses the streets has animated vociferous and provocative debates. While the decreasing costs of cars means over a 1000 cars are added to Delhi’s roads everyday, it is also true that almost 80% of people on Delhi’s roads are cyclists, pedestrians and those who use buses. Add to this the fact that the street is the preserve not only of people getting from one place to the other, but also the site of livelihood for many – a site of contestation and conflict. It is clear that any transport policy will have to take into account these conflicting visions, and a debate on transport is centrally a debate over the futures of the city. Join us for an open discussion, and what will hopefully be an animated conservation with:
1. AGK Menon – Introduction
2. Madhu Kishwar – Planning for Street Life
3. Romi Roy – The Vision of UTTIPEC and Guidelines for Street Design
4. Manit Rastogi – Nallahs as Urban Connectors
5. Sandeep Gandhi -A Bicycle Master Plan for Delhi
6. AGK Menon – A Traffic Management Plan for the MCD Civic Centre Precinct
February 22nd, 2010 by Kavya
Guest post from a friend, Devika Narayan
I attended an intense and exciting discussion on Delhi where many people from different fields spoke. The following is a patchwork of their words (more or less) . A total mishmash of voices, ideas and arguments. Hope it is some what coherent.
They talk repeatedly about Delhi and the loss of memory. The long, forgotten past which is erased from our collective memory. A pathological inability to recall the biographic journey that brought us to here. We advocate a sustained determined effort to unlock the gates of memory and end this distorting amnesia.
Indulge in guilty nostalgia. The Sarkari city of the 80s and the government bungalow, the open spaces and the fifty bird species in the garden. You become an easy intellectual target who is attacked for being a middle class romantic, longing for an invented past . But don’t dismiss nostalgia you say, drawing upon nostalgia as a technique of critiquing the present can be a useful exercise. However, while reconciling the experience of the endless centuries gone by with the chaotic present, one must also claim the future in a conscious way. The has been a lack of public debate when it comes imagining the future of Delhi. That is to say, debate about contemporary architecture, about housing, about alternative city plans are absent. We need to construct an imagination of the future in the most democratic and open way possible. City planning is not a technical process but is instead deeply political. We can not entrust the planning of the a city to ‘experts’ and ‘technicians’ whose objective is to mould cityscape as per the power of their will. We are trying to plan the poor out of existence-eliminating them from imaginings of the city, sweeping them off the map. Our city will never resemble a master plan. After all, how do you plan informality? Can you plan informality?
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February 18th, 2010 by Aarti
4:00 P.M., 19th February 2010
Library, Sarai-CSDS, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi-54
Ravi Sundaram, Gautam Bhan, Awadhendra Sharan, AGK Menon, Amita Baviskar, Narayani Gupta
The inaugural event, ‘The Image of the City’ is an open discussion on Delhi’s urban form and possible directions for future conversations.
