Urban Architecture
Cities are made of forces, fears, rhythms, gossips, transactions and accumulations.
Through this course, we attempted to read and respond to the city by acknowledging our feelings of dislike and disgust about a certain chosen place and then reading and observing it rather than reacting to it.
The site is a short stretch on Eksar road in Borivali West.
The reason for dislike emanated from this over spilling of the 'waste' or the excesses of production onto the footpath as well as the road as a result of which one could not walk on that side of the road.
This was initially seen by me as an 'encroachment' of the otherwise walkable footpath.
Plan of the site
Henri Lefebvre's Rhythmanalysis is an essay that helped us to articulate and read our site through the lens of rhythms.
“To grasp a rhythm, it is necessary to have been grasped by it.”
The rhythms on my site follow a circadian twenty-four hour clock.
-A habitual accumulation of sofa production waste
-the falling of leaves from the trees beyond the boundary wall
-the occasional chopping of the branches that interrupt the flow of the street
-an accumulation of waste from the Tailor, the sandwich stall owner, the debris of the fallen greens and some waste thrown by residents.
-two-wheelers and the occasional car are parked skirting the garbage
-Automatically, a path develops around this encroachment and accumulation of the footpath and forms an unseen, non-linear route that pedestrians, vehicle owners follow.
-Seldom, a stray dog may pop in to check if there is any food in this pile
-Sometimes the garbage truck may pick up the pile of waste around 3pm.
-Thus majorly, no one interrupts this cycle on site.
In short, four rhythms identified were of :
1.Accumulation
2.Collection
3.disorder
4.encroachment
In my response, I suggested the intervention of objects that become street furniture on the road stretch such that one starts to engage with the site.
The above response was critiqued as being 'reactionary ' to the rhythms of the site and not one that aided the rhythms mentioned.
Further in the course, we read Yin-Fu Tuan's 'Strangers and Strangeness' and Abdou Maliq Simone's 'People as Infrastructure'.
“In modern society, the experience of the strange- a kind of grace- may have waned as a result of people’s power over nature, but contact with strangers and dependence on them have increased.” Tuan argues on behalf of the unfamiliar here, by saying that we are more dependent on strangers now than ever before in a way that the lives we lead, the things we use and inhabit and the gestures that we perform- they are all produced by millions of people working on the back end, people that we may have never met and will never meet. He gives the example of a certain tribe that prefers to give themselves to nature and embrace the wilderness and unfamiliarity because living in the village where culture is played out, takes way more effort. By effort here it means - expectations, customs, demeanor, norms that make up the unsaid rules of living in a ‘civilized’ society.
As I re-look at my site (stretch on Eksar road) through the lenses of this essay, I begin to understand that there are forces that act here that play out subtly and can only be observed if one inhabits the site as if one is part of it. There is a regularity or routine-ness to the garbage that gets accumulated and a rhythm with which the leaves and branches fall thus adding to the waste below. The regularity (or familiarity in this case) stays true to the setting up of shop of the sofa-maker, the sandwich stall and the tailor. Meanwhile the odd customer or passerby who chose to interact with the setup for a change enters into strange territory. When I first encountered the site with the sole lens of observing it for its rhythms, the realization struck that I too am a complete stranger to this site which I pass by every day. The familiar suddenly becomes unfamiliar when you start making yourself aware of the finer details.
Further I tried to soften my response by making space for these accumulations to happen and carve out a path for these rhythms. But this response was still enabling passersby to skirt around and tiptoe around the spillages.
This created a human path of it's own which did not enforce the existing rhythms.
The city may have been provided with wide roads and footpaths as part of the planner’s perspective but we operate without delineated notions of how these features are to be inhabited and used. Hence the unexpected extensions and ‘encroachments’ take place.This boundedness does not benefit the transactions that occur in a city like Mumbai which majorly works on encounters - that people have with other people or the actions of others. On my site, this is evident in the fact that I notice the shop of the sofa maker not because I see the hastily put-up sign board but because of the foam and plywood that is stacked outside the shop on the footpath- the obstruction which is compelling me to walk on the road. And similarly the sandwich stall is noticed because of its fixed presence on the footpath after 4pm and thus so on. These corrosions of urban features facilitate a changed cityscape every time you pass through it. The site has something new to offer and thus for me, even the city becomes a part of the wild- not wholly unfamiliar but offering an unknown (or strange) experience each day.
The site is seen as an accumulation, spillage and collection of everyday remains of production.
The spillage being central character to the space. And hence the site drawing of the forces had to reflect the same.
The response becomes an extension to the rhythm of corrosion of the path- where I encourage such a spillage and facilitate it to happen. These objects are all inviting one to come and take a look or simply to indulge in this accumulation. Here Bricolage becomes a method to incorporate existing elements of the space that over-spill into temporary street objects that attract the folks.
BEFORE
AFTER
The course enabled us to recognize the body as a means of experiencing the city through its forces and being a part of its operative energies. This when juxtaposed with the problem solving tendency opens up different ways of perceiving the city in its fragments which do not sum up to become a whole but have rhythms of their own.