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.

talk_of_the_town_goethe

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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.

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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

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.

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.

During the Urban Security Workshop, held in Bangalore in March 2011, we discussed various nuances of the sense of security in an urban context. For details about the workshop, see this page and the workshop brief.

In the workshop, we tried real-time documentation of locations of urban insecurities and securities; and thus emerged the ‘Bangalore Security Map’. It is a map of all the places in the city, where we feel ‘insecure’. We consciously kept the definition of ‘insecurity’ open, so that the map can truly reflect the public emotions and not a government-sanctioned idea of security.

While the map produced during the workshop was quite limited due to its dependence on the experience of the people in the workshop, we wanted to take it forward following a crowd-sourcing model. We are grateful to CSTEP for spearheading the development of the crowd-sourced mapping portal and for a very warm collaborative experience.

Please visit the ‘Bangalore Security Map’ at bsm.mod.org.in and express your ideas and experiences of insecurity in Bangalore. You can follow the twitter feed of submissions at @scurtymap_bnglr.

We want to know where in the city you feel insecure and why so. Further, if you feel insecure at a certain part of the city (at a certain time perhaps), please share with us what could have make you feel otherwise.

We are hopeful that a map such as this will create various new discussions about the city, will lead to many different conceptualisation about making the city more livable.

Acknowledgements:

The portal is jointly developed by CSTEP and MOD, using the Ushahidi platform (‘Luanda’).

The top image is courtesy of Anja Gollor and Mirko Merkel. They were in Bangalore for their project on visual landscape of the city, and participated in the Urban Security Workshop. Details of their project can be found here.