Positioned Contradictions between the Past and Future -. Examining Change in Indian Urbanities
Collaborators: Manu P. Sobti & Sangeeta Bagga
The physical structure and complexity of the quintessential Asian city often presents an incomprehensible tabula rasa to the student researcher and designer. For one, its plethora of urban conditions seemingly defy ‘normative’ logic, especially traditional descriptions of so-called rational space making. At a second level, new forms of accelerated urbanization in such developing global contexts, frequently embody radical innovation and profound change, producing an unprecedented urban place where architecture is no longer high art, and is often produced beyond the singular control of the designer. Architecture and building interventions are then, merely the means to an end, positioning their designers as inconsequential components manipulated by a larger framework of politics and economics. Therefore, as cities modernize beyond professional control, no longer is the architect, urbanist or landscape architect able to sufficiently describe, let alone influence, large areas of the urban realm as even in the recent past. How must the designer then begin to engage with the urban artifact of the Asian world? After all, why simplify space and place; why remove the opportunities to design in the city?
Figures 1, 2 & 3: Design Explorations and Diagramming Studies in Chandigarh (top), Ahmedabad (middle and bottom), 2008 & 2009 (SARUP-India Urban Design Studio)
This ongoing research argues that this double crisis of disciplinary paralysis with respect to the Asian city warrants the urgent need to study the complexity of the urban artifact on its own terms, through its multiplicity of evolving agents and actors, relationships and consequences of relentless urbanization. Critiquing such urbanity as undesirable would be but naivety, so would experiments with design choices that fail to realize its permanent implications. Within this context, we frame provocative student design and research investigations initiated in the ongoing INDIA Urban Design Studio Series (2008 – present) held at the School of Architecture, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee USA and the College of Architecture, Punjab University-Chandigarh INDIA, to problematize how conflict, contestation, adjustment and reconciliation between the past and present are embodied in the making of architecture and urban form in the Indian city. It examines how this double crisis may actually be an inventive tool to deploy in older, historical urban foundations, as well as the newer cities that face similar challenges of explosive growth in the decades to come. Finally, this research suggests that international designers shall have to prepare for a future wherein the Asian city shall challenge our prevalent notions of design and urbanity – including space with non-space, the specific with the ordinary or transient, memory with opportunity, and permanence with impermanence.