Wrap up session – IIA NATCON 2016 at Bengaluru, By Prem Chandavarkar (conference curator)

Wrap up session – IIA NATCON 2016 at Bengaluru

Where do we go from here?

By Prem Chandavarkar (conference curator)

(NOTE: this was recorded by me at the conference and has been reproduced here (almost verbatim). Some words in italics are the ones which I could not hear clearly from the recording. This is put up here so that the people who did not attend the conference may listen and possibly get inspired)

We architects are held up with in the cocoon of our own individual practices. What we do affects the city and as architects we also been unknowingly complacent in structures of segregation and exclusion that has happened in our cities.

We must think in terms of right to the city, for much of our population receives inadequate attention from the process of urban planning and management.

We must ask, is the city a given image of plan into which its population must adjust, or is it a given population that will inclusively negotiate its own form.

As David Harvey pointed out the right to the city is not just a right to urban amenities, but the right to remake the city and to remake ourselves in the process.

Cities are complex and open systems and to reduce them to unitary descriptions like the metaphor of the ideal global city like Singapore or Shanghai, or terms such as smart is to violently impose simplicity upon complexity and create structures of exclusion that these descriptions mask.

Complexity means that urbanism is a condition that is specific with its own physical form and potential, yet is also a condition that is continuously in flux, and how we imagine the city will determine whether that flus is leveraged as an asset or resisted as an obstacle.

Whether we will know how we can constructively leverage time as a means of enriching our inhabitation of cities and we need to recognize that a great deal of our urban population lives or perhaps I should say copes that way.

While architects alone cannot tackle the challenges ahead of us, our complicity in urbanism and the credibility our profession enjoys, requires that we purposefully act on the urban challenge and the fact that we are one profession who does have the ability to work across a range of scales.

Our models must evolve from indigenous and local grounds and not just from imported models, however glamorous those models may seem.

Limiting ourselves to the object vs process binary is inadequate, there are wider ethical questions we must come to terms with, about how we make our society or the public realm democratically constituted and we must energetically and critically think about the role of the state, the professions and the public in dealing with these ethical demands with in our cities.

So we need to think about how our cities can constitute a public commons at a physical, social, economic and ecological level and how we must live and collaborate to sustain this common. I think this was summed up well by a statement once I heard made at a different conference, which was described as a panchasheela of urban development – “that the city must be culturally vibrant, economically dynamic, socially just, ecologically sustainable and politically participatory”.

There has been some impatience we have heard with questions and criticisms such as __ Ok all this criticism is fine but what are the solutions? Why are we not talking to the government about this, we are not presenting both sides of the picture? and what do we do now?

So since my concluding note is described is described in the program as where do we go from here let me seek to respond to this.

First of all we must appreciate the need to act and the urgency of that need and that is why we organized this conference. As was stated in one of the discussions, understanding the questions is half of the solution and that has been the focus how this conference was designed, structured and the focus the focus of its deliberations, but we have to realize that solutions are specific and we would do a disservice by seeking to generalise them in a conference of this size.

Each of us must go back to our own cities and start at that level.

A remark about how cities are complex systems, another word for complex systems is emergent. An emergent is one that can have fundamental properties that were not present in the earlier state of the system and that’s how cities work and in emergence the emphasis is not on envisioning finite solutions the emphasis is on immediate engagement.

It is actually not the way we are trained, but it is the way we actually live.

Think of a simple thing that is part of our everyday life like friendship. The very first time we met someone who we call our friend, we didn’t have a plan saying that in five years our friendship should be like this. If we probably went constructing such a plan we would never have developed that friendship. We developed that friendship because we put plans aside and focussed on the immediate engagement, discovered some resonance in that engagement and built upon that slowly and incrementally and in evolutionary manner.

Actually that’s the way life operates and if we just get back to that common sense principle it would really _______ to what the energy of cities is. So we lay the infrastructure for that to happen.

In friendship we might have said, ok let’s at least, we don’t know what will happen, our first meeting has gone well, so let’s conduct the meeting again and again. So in a way probably that is what a public realm of the city needs to do. Allow that through ____ its citizens.

So when we do that our perspective perhaps needs to change. As John Turner said that close to 40 years back “housing should be seen as a work and not as a product, it’s a mode by which people add value to their life” and while putting technical standards as a product we sometimes, it creates structures of exclusion. By seeing it as a work we put power in the hands of people to make their own choices and their own trade off of cost and benefits in a mode that is relevant to their own lives and of course if we do that we have to create subsidies of benefits that they really needed to have but could not afford. But really the notion of emergence means that we have to start with solutions and built from that.

Here at IIA Karnataka chapter we have started a process where we are selecting one ward of the city and we are working to see what can be done in terms of planning at local level. So we are working on the Domlur ward, we have already done some initial surveys, it stopped a bit because we all got busy organizing this conference but we will go back to it. We would like other centres in Karnataka to do that and perhaps this is the initiative to go forward where we start developing these visions within ourselves.

Now there are two things we are doing in this process. One is that we are starting with the circle of our influence and not being paralysed by circle of concern, because our circle of concern sometimes is so wide that we don’t even act on our circle of influence. Or we sometimes think just talking about the circle of concern is ok we don’t act on circle of influence.

So this is something we don’t have a commission from the city to do this plan, but we are just going to do it, and that’s something that we start to do.

But the other thing is what we don’t start this thing as soon as we see a problem we say lets go to the government and actually if the government suddenly one day says ok we will do whatever you want tell us want to do we would probably not have an adequate answer at that stage.

So I think we have to just work start looking at the lateral engagement amongst us as fellow architects and develop more rigorous visions of what our cities can be and that is how we can take things forward and we not only build the numbers of people so we are more powerful at the moment that we chose to go to the government what we also have will be more directed vision.

There is a joke I often repeat, which I say as a joke but I take it very seriously. It’s a story of a man in the middle of the French revolution sitting in a café and having a cup of coffee and then this huge mob runs past on the street and the man drops his cup of coffee and he runs after them saying I must catch up with those people. I am their leader. So I think that is what we need to do where we feel we may come together and develop these visions of power that our so called leaders must feel that they must catch up with us.

Virginia Wolf in an entry in her journal said the future is dark and that is the best thing the future can be. What she meant by dark was that it is inscrutable rather than terrifying, but we often tend to be terrified by what is uncertain and we often equate these two possible interpretations of dark and try to dispel the darkness with a false certainty of plans that are disconnected from the life on ground. But we should see the fact that the future is dark is also a sign of optimism, because that darkness creates actually a tremendous possibility where we can shine our light.

So the only way to dispel this darkness is not to say we must go to the government, the government must listen to us etc, but to build that resilient community of engagement with in architects starting at the local level and going upwards. That can deal with this uncertainty of the future day by day, one day at a time, incrementally evolving to higher levels, because this engagement is founded on faith, hope, collaboration and rigorous critique and critique including ourselves in the process.

So as a community of architects we must truly believe to the bottom of our hearts that we need to make a difference and that need is urgent. We are ethically responsible for making a difference, we can make a difference and we will make a difference.

And on that foundation let this be a launching pad for architects coming together to constructively and inclusively imagine the Indian City.

Thank you !!!!

Hope you enjoyed reading….

And in a way would have been inspired….

I thought this is the need of the hour and hence have put it here so people can see….

Good Day

Muzakkir G. M. Bijli