Urban Culture and Change in India – The Berlin Lectures
During the last months, the MOD team in Berlin gave two lectures on urban culture and change in Bangalore and in India.
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Archived entries for Design
Space is the Yantra
The last issue of Urban Design journal, published by the Urban Design Group, London, focused on to urban design practice and discourses in India . Invited by the editors of the issue, Naresh, Anne and Sumandro of MOD, contributed an essay on ‘Reinventing the Indian City.’
While the full contents of the issue will soon be available at the journal website, below is an excerpt from the piece:
India is an ancient urban civilisation. The sub-continent has faced the challenges of planning cities and providing for growing populations since 2300 BC. By 700 BC, India had gone through its second urban revolution with the growth of sixteen ‘Mahajanapada’ (literally, megacities) across the Indus-Gangetic-Vetravati-Godavari plains. A unique set of codes for spatially organising the urban centres, from the city scale to that of the household, has existed since then and was applied in building the Harappan cities (BC 2600-1900).
In later years, an evolved form of these spatial logics came to be known as the ‘vastu shastra,’ variously understood as knowledge or discipline of built objects or spatial design. One of the central elements of this body of knowledge is the ‘yantra,’ literally meaning ‘machine,’ which meant a harmonious configuration of various forces towards a common goal or state of being.
Recently there have been different attempts to interpret these texts in a modern context. This essay re-visits the ancient concept of ‘yantra’ – as a practice of spatial analysis based on human experience – and re-interprets it as an analytical and visual device for studying and re-inventing Indian cities. Furthermore it takes the concepts of ‘informality’ and historicity into account to evoke productive strategies for the future cities of India.
Naresh Narasimhan and Anne-Katrin Fenk are Co-Founders of MOD and Sumandro Chattapadhyay is modbug-at-large. Find more about them in the MOD team page.
‘Cities for People’ – CoLab Lecture
In the CoLab/Goethe panel discussion on ‘Reclaiming Public Space for People’ held in May this year, Naresh spoke about ‘Cities for People.’
He discussed the processes in Indian cities today that are undermining the public spaces — namely, automobile-isation, infrastructure-isation and security-isation. Through a historical evaluation of making of public spaces in Bangalore, he reflected on what it takes to make public spaces, what is the design process for making/re-claiming public spaces for people.
Here is a copy of the presentation on ‘Cities for People.’ The presentation can also be accessed at Sildeshare.
For further information, including downloadable version of the document, please contact us at mail[at]mod[dot]org[dot]in
Naresh Narasimhan is Co-founder of MOD Institute and the Principal Architect at Venkataramanan Associates. Read more about him in the MOD team page.
Tahrir Square image courtesy of Ben Curtis/AP.
MOD at Design!publiC in Delhi
Tile von Damm will take part at the conference Design!publiC in Delhi on Friday 18th March 2011.
“Design Public is a conversation about whether and how to bring design thinking to bear upon the challenges of government so as to promote governance innovation.”
For more details about the conference, please see here: http://designpublic.in/
The Design!publiC Conference book can be found here.
Project on Visual Language of Bangalore
Anja Gollor and Mirko Merkel of the Faculty of Graphic Design at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, Germany, are currently working on a research project on “The Visual Language of Bangalore”
They are on an exploration trip in Bangalore from February 28 until March 31, 2011. They are working with different methods such as field research, mental maps, documentary photography as well as interactions in the public space to discover the visual language of the urban area of Bangalore.
mod institute is hosting them in Bangalore and supporting their research.
Click here for Anja and Mirko’s website: silicongarden.in
Note: Image courtesy of Anja Gollor and Mirko Merkel.
