We are honoured to announce that Dr. Ashwin Mahesh, Bindu Nair and Prof. Dirk Hebel will give the lectures at the second session of the Talk of the Town lecture series, being organised by Goethe Institute, Bangalore and MOD Institute.

The first lecture began with Richard Saul Wurman’s famous call for “making the city observable” to interrogate different practices of SEEeing the city through cartography and other visual means and how those shape our everyday urban experiences and decisions.

The second lecture ‘ACT’ will have urban practitioners and actors discussing and comparing various strategies and tactics undertaken by them to intervene in city processes. The discussion will focus on how specific ways of ‘acting’ or ‘intervening’ in the city can create or dismantle urban hierarchies, and also what examples of ‘acting’ in the city can be found in the urban discourse in India.

SPEAKERS and MODERATOR

Dr. Ashwin Mahesh is with the Center for Public Policy at IIM Bangalore. A PhD in atmospheric remote sensing from the University of Washington, his expertise lies in exploring the expanding role of technology amd IT and its creative use in urban traffic management in the future. He is co-founder of India Together and Mapunity.

Bindu Nair is Principal Planner at HCP Design and Project Management Pvt. Ltd. She is a geographer urban & regional planner with extensive experience in the field of statutory urban and regional planning, including physical planning, building basemaps, land use studies for statutory development plans and interpreting satellite imageries for urban land cover.

Prof. Dirk E. Hebel is currently holds the Assistant Professor for Architecture and Construction at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. He is part of the research team at the Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore, a cooperation of the National Research Fund Singapore and the ET H Zürich. He also practices architecture in Switzerland and Germany
with his firm DRKH Architecture.

The session will be moderated by Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed, a journalist with Frontline. In his journalistic career he has covered a wide variety of issues ranging from state politics, religious and other conflicts, development issues and has also written regularly on film.

AGENDA

6:00 pm – Opening

6:20 pm – Welcome:
Christoph Bertrams, Director, Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore
V. Naresh Narasimhan, MOD Institute, Bangalore/Berlin

6:30 pm – Lecture
Dr. Ashwin Mahesh, Center for Public Policy, IIM Bangalore
Bindu Nair, HCP Design and Project Management Pvt. Ltd.
Prof. Dirk E. Hebel, ETH Zurich/Singapore
Moderation: Vikhar Ahmed Sayeed, Frontline

WHEN and WHERE

The lecture will be held on Thursday, 29th March, 2012, at 6:00 pm in Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, located in 716 CMH Road, Indiranagar 1st Stage.

Please R.S.V.P. for the event at mail[at]mod.org.in

Download the event flyer here.

Link to the Goethe-Institut page for the lecture series.

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The first part of the workshop involved mapping four different market places in New Delhi. The method of mapping was utilised to experience, document and initiate discussions about legality/illegality and formality/informality in Indian market places.

Here are the images of the final area maps prepared by the students over two half-day sessions — half a day for exploration and information mapping and half a day for organising the information and developing final maps.

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We are honoured to announce that Dr. Solomon Benjamin and Prof. Jörg Stollmann will give the lectures at the inaugaral session of the Talk of the Town lecture series, being organised by Goethe Institute, Bangalore and MOD Institute.

The first lecture begins with Richard Saul Wurman’s famous call for “making the city observable” to interrogate different practices of seeing the city through cartography and other visual means and how those shape our everyday urban experiences and decisions. In the first lecture, we are especially interested in having a discussion on how specific ways of ‘seeing’ or ‘visualising’ the city can create or dismantle urban hierarchies, and also what ways of ‘seeing’ the city dominate the urban discourse in India.

SPEAKERS and MODERATOR

Dr. Benjamin is an urbanist operating out of Bangalore. He is faculty at the Manipal School of Architecture and Planning, and a senior research associate with the French Institute Pondicherry. Prof. Stollmann is co-founder of urbaninform and an architect and urban designer based in Zurich. His practice ranges from design projects to urban research and curatorial work.

The session will be moderated by Zainab Bawa, a PhD scholar at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore, working on the changing land regulations, regimes and property relations that are transforming the landscape of politics and economy in large Indian cities.

AGENDA

6:30 pm – Opening

7:00 pm – Welcome:
Christoph Bertrams, Director, Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore
Tile von Damm, MOD-Institute Bangalore/Berlin

7:15 pm – Lecture
Dr. Solomon Benjamin, Manipal School of Architecture and Planning, Bangalore
Prof. Jörg Stollman, Technical University Berlin & Urbaninform, Zürich
Moderation: Zainab Bawa, Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore

WHEN and WHERE

The lecture will be held on Thursday, 9th February, 2012, at 6:30 pm in Goethe Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, located in 716 CMH Road, Indiranagar 1st Stage.

Please R.S.V.P. for the event at mail[at]mod.org.in

Download the event flyer here.

Link to the Goethe-Institut page for the lecture series.

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Venkataramanan Associates, MOD Institute and Jaaga are organising the first Pecha Kucha Night Bangalore event of the year on Thursday, 26th January 2012.

The event will engage with the spirit of the Republic Day to re-imagine the idea of the ‘public’. We are interested in de-mystifying the notion and to rethink the energies, concerns, resources and actions that involve the ‘public’.

We are calling it *Re:Public*.

Beginning at 7 pm in Jaaga, there will be seven presentations (see the list below), followed by a longish, relaxed and unstructured interaction time lubricated by ideas and drinks.

We invite you to join us on for an evening of sharp and thought-provoking discussions.

—

Date: Thursday, 26th January 2012
Time: 7 pm to 9 pm
Place: Jaaga, Double Road [map]

Speakers: Archana Prasad (Jaaga), Bijoy Ramachandran (Hundredhands), Commonground, Shilo Shiv Suleman, Sridhar Pabbisetty (Ride-A-Cycle Foundation), Sudhir Krishnaswamy (Centre for Law and Policy Research), and The Ugly Indian.

During the last months, the MOD team in Berlin gave two lectures on urban culture and change in Bangalore and in India.

// Lecture at University of Arts Berlin

Anne-Katrin Fenk gave a lecture at University of Arts in Berlin ( Prof. Gabrielle Hächler and Prof. Andreas Fuhrimann) on city development in India. For details see here: http://www.arch.udk-berlin.de/staedtebau/

// Lecture at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee

Anne-Katrin Fenk and Tile von Damm gave a lecture on city development in Bangalore at Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee on 8th November. Students of Communication Design under Prof. Stefan Koppelkamp participated in a discussion with MOD, especially about their projects on market(s) in Bangalore.

Anne-Katrin Fenk and Tile von Damm are Co-Founders of MOD. Find more about them in the MOD team page.

Visualisation courtesy: Aline Löw and Clara Berger. More about them here.

Naresh Narasimhan recently spoke at the Sixth Annual Conference of the Centre for Public Policy at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He was invited to part of a panel discussion on ‘ICT for Urban Governance’.

The theme sits well into MOD’s research area on ‘data city’. Naresh identified Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and ICT-enabled urban infrastructure at the core of the contemporary urban form. Then he went on to suvey a range of upcoming approaches using ICT for bettering urban governance as well as participatory citizenship.

Below is a copy of the presentation on ‘ICT for Urban Governance.’ The presentation can also be accessed on 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. Find more about him in the MOD team page.

Image Courtesy: Eric Fischer

RAY is a cricial affordable housing and city planning policy guideline released by the Ministry of Housing and Urban Poverty Alleviation early this year. This guideline is to set the approach of State Governments in creating ‘Slum-Free’ cities by re-developing (and rehabilitating) existing slums as well as planning for future growth in urban housing demand. It will also govern the support from the Central Government in such housing exercises.

The presentation by MOD argued for a greater recognition of the smaller scale housing construction sector in Indian cities within RAY guidelines. This will ensure a more inclusive housing practice as well as address issues of small-scale optimisation of residential density.

Please find below the slides from the presentation.

Sumandro is modbug-at-large. Find more about him in the MOD team page.

Naresh Narasimhan and Tile Von Damm recently participated in an Open Consultation on ‘Bangalore as a Creative City’ to discuss policy recommendations involving urban arts and culture spaces, on Thursday 29th September, 2011.

The consultation was organised by the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society (CSCS), Bangalore in collaboration with the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Bangalore, the Ministry of Culture, Government of India and Swissnex India.

Naresh made a presentation at the event on the topic ‘Cultural Spaces as Developing Local Economy.’ Below is an excerpt from the news report of the session by The Hindu:

“What is a non-cultural space?” Naresh Narasimhan, architect from a leading Bangalore-based firm asked “What is a Non-Cultural Space” in his presentation. With a stunning visual of the City Market’s flower market, he brought up worlds that we have forgotten. “This place pulsates with culture. Everyday, the smells and sights change, as do the colours. It is the most dramatic cultural space,” he observed.

Bangalore was made up of several villages, each with its own festivals and jaatres. Every village had a water body, and its public space was a temple. The city phenomenon steam rolled all the villages along with its cultural practises, thereby erasing all sites of creativity. “If BBMP swallowed 300 villages, BMRDA swallowed 1000,” and now you find the city filled with dissonant images of a humungous flyover under which you find a dilapidated temple. “All we now care for is how to make our cars go faster,” argued Naresh.

Bangalore’s vibrant character and lush landscape has made way for a monolithic understanding of cultural spaces. “Hence, when we now celebrate manufactured green sites within new, massive structures, we forget that it used to be someone’s way of life,” said Naresh.

Source

Here is a copy of the presentation on ‘Cultural Spaces as Developing Local Economy.’ 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 and Tile Von Damm are Co-Founders of MOD. Find more about them in the MOD team page.

K.R. Market image courtesy of Santanu Majumdar.

Bangalore Security Map, a crowd-sourcing portal for archiving information on perceptions of urban insecurities in Bangalore, was launched last month. The portal grew out of our work on urban security issues, and was built in collaboration with CSTEP.

The work was featured recently in one of the biggest national newspaper (The Hindu) as well as city-based daily (Bangalore Mirror).

Below are the excerpts from the news stories:

“[T]he Bangalore security map http://bsm.mod.org.in/ was launched this week. It seeks to understand how citizens perceive security in the city by asking questions about their insecurities and pins responses on a map. This joint project of the Centre for Study of Science, Technology and Policy (CSTEP) and MOD, an international collective of architects, designers, researchers, curators and practitioners based in Bangalore and Berlin, has 18 reports now.”

Source: The Hindu

“In March this year, MOD had organised a workshop to explore various facets of security in an urban context. Jayanth R, research engineer, CSTEP, said the workshop was aimed at going beyond conventional notions on security…  Citizens have already begun reporting on incidents with more than 20 incidents, ranging from muggings to unruly behaviour and eve teasing, being recorded in the span of a month.”

Source: Bangalore Mirror