MOD Institute

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.

‘Otto Koenigsberger: Bringing Modernism to India’ Research Project

How did a German refugee become the first Director of Housing in independent India? How did the Indian environment transform European modernism in the 1940s? Who were the main players in shaping Mysore State’s urban development in the first half of the last century?

These are some of the questions that Rachel Lee is endeavouring to answer in her PhD thesis “Otto Koenigsberger: Bringing Modernism to India”. By using the biography of the German refugee architect and planner Otto Koenigsberger (1908-1999) as a critical research tool, she is analysing a defining period in India’s architecture and planning history.

In the run up to Indian independence, from 1939-1948, Koenigsberger was the Chief Architect and Planner of Princely Mysore State. From his base in Bangalore he designed a wide range of public and private buildings from bus terminals to theatres and hunting lodges to universities. In addition, he produced master plans for major industrial towns such as Jamshedpur and co-founded the architecture and design periodical MARG.

With independence, a period of nation building began, and Koenigsberger, who had been appointed Federal Director of Housing by Prime Minister Nehru in 1948, was in a highly influential position. In particular, he was responsible for addressing the problem of housing approximately 10,000,000 predominantly Hindu refugees flooding into India from Pakistan following partition. By the time he left India for London in August 1951, Koenigsberger had planned four new towns (including Bhubaneswar, the capital of Orissa State), supervised the development and planning of a further two, developed an affordable prefab housing system and designed its production process.

By focusing on Koenigsberger—the person at the centre of a diverse network of figures including Jawaharlal Nehru, Mirza Ismail, Jamshed Bhabha, Vikram Sarabhai, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, Mulk Raj Anand and Rabindranath Tagore—Rachel Lee’s work will contribute to a much‐needed re‐evaluation of the post‐colonial architectural and urban development in a rapidly urbanizing country.

The results of Rachel Lee’s work will form the foundation of an exhibition titled “Urban Visionaries”, which is scheduled to be shown at the NGMA Bangalore in 2012. The exhibition will also showcase Gustav Krumbiegel’s landscape architecture in Bangalore and will be curated by MOD and the Visual Art Collective, Bangalore.

Rachel is a MODbug. Read more about her in the MOD team page.

Pre-fabricated Housing Factory

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.

‘in formation’: Studying Mass Housing in Bangalore

Clara Berger and Aline Löw from the Urban Design Program of TU Berlin are working on a research project named “in formation — A study about resident-guided interventions in mass housing settlements in Bangalore”.

To understand habitat dynamics, Clara and Aline are providing center stage to the residents and considering their interactions with the planned environment in the course of everyday life. These can be small built interventions or community organisations, which contribute to the standard of living. They are looking at how mass housing settlements are turning into livable urban neighbourhoods over time. They are also exploring planned neighbourhoods of the 1920s and 1970s in Bangalore/Bengaluru.

The initial point of this research project was the ongoing housing debate, more precisely the lack of affordable housing in India. By capturing neighbourhoods in formation, they will document potentials, demands and adaptation patterns and present this information in various booklets.

mod institute hosted them in Bangalore and is supporting their research.

Clara Berger and Aline Löw are currently working on this research project for their master thesis in the Urban Design program of the Technical University of Berlin.