MOD Institute

Bangalore Security Map in News

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

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.

Bangalore Security Map

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.

MOD on Making Collaborative Social Networks

Federated Social Web 2011, a three day open event on Social Web interoperability, standards and privacy, begins today at Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, Berlin and will go on till June 5th.

The event will discuss issues such as the differences between XMPP and HTTP federation and how they can be united, the technological aspects and challenges associated with the social web and how to design and implement an open source privacy and trust enabled communication platform.

The event is being organised by W3C and PerGlobal with gracious support from Heinrich-Böll-Foundation, Berlin. Tile von Damm, of PerGlobal and MOD, is part of the organising team.

The event schedule is available here, while details about the projects can be found in the event wiki. Live tweeter feed of the event can be followed using the hashtag #fsw2011.

Tile von Damm is Co-Founder of MOD and Co-Founder of PerGlobal. Read more about him in the mod.team page.

MOD on ‘Reclaiming Public Space for People’

Naresh Narasimhan will speak at the upcoming CoLab/Goethe panel discussion on ‘Reclaiming Public Space for People.’ The event is part of the Practices in Contemporary Art & Architecture Lecture Series co-organised by CoLab Art & Architecture and the Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan Bangalore.

The discussion will address the questions of how citizens can “participate in the process of bringing new ideas to a stale status quo [and effectively realised] the freedom to choose between leisure and doing, between reflection and rushing.”

The event will be held in Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore at 6:30pm on 31st May, Tuesday.

Details about the event can be found here.

Naresh is Co-founder of MOD and the Principal Architect at Venkataramanan Associates. Read more about him in the MOD team page.