Image: Fusionopolis, one of the newest indoor entertainment mall of Singapore.

Public spaces are sacrosanct in urban planning rhetoric and embody a range of virtues—from the community to the commons, from equality to inclusive citizenship. What constitutes a public space, however, is often a point of contention

Shopping malls, plazas, sidewalks, parks, museums, pedestrian pathways, flea markets, bazaars, and even transport systems like the metro in Delhi—are all contenders for the label of “public space.”

As cities aspire to “world-class” status—an idea which carries its own set of notions of what public space should be all about—grand urban designs begin to dominate the imagination of planners and developers and reconfigure our cities.

The notion of the word-class city emerged after political and developmental discourse gave up on the first, second and third world distinctions from the Cold War era. The global city, with its high urban standards, linked to other such cities through gleaming new airports, became the capital of the new world order.

In such a city, the coming together of speculation-driven real estate development and the idea of “public space” has produced weird urban species. In New York, for instance, developers are encouraged to create open spaces in front or below their buildings in exchange for additional floor area. More often than not, these “privately owned public spaces” are designed to discourage genuine public use.

In a city like New Delhi, well-protected and spacious historical sites, public parks, plazas and malls stand as a contrast to the action-packed and crowded streets of the anti-thesis of the world class in the very local, Chandni Chowk. In neighborhoods that decidedly don’t fit with the world class vision, such as Dharavi in Mumbai, where any space is currency, designated public space is virtually non-existent but the spirit of the public infuses every nook and corner. Crowded streets become collective spaces during festivals; temples and shrines become either thoroughfares or meeting points; they remain oases of calm or contribute to the general din.

A layer of public-ness settles onto traffic-infested streets when collective prayer has to happen and for that one moment waves of urban chaos freeze, and allow for that incredible flash of community to manifest itself before crashing back into their usual stormy selves a few minutes later. More often than not, leisure, commercial and communication uses share the same space and time: streets are typically used simultaneously as a playground by kids, sales points by a street vendor, pedestrian links to the train station, as well as meeting places for residents, drying spaces for clothes and advertising spaces for movies and recruitment agencies.

These two extreme examples, of designed but underused monumental spaces and the squeezing out of public moments in space-starved neighborhoods indicates that there is much more to urban public space and life than merely how much space is formally accounted for it in physical terms.

However, the idea of a world-class city short-circuits these discussions before we can discuss whether Indian cities should be more like Old or New Delhi—or debate if Dharavi has its own peculiar notion of public space, or if New York’s designed public spaces are passé.

It is a slogan, as if devised by a marketing agency, to sell the latest fashions in cosmetic urbanism—an alluring ready-to-wear one-size vision that promises to fit all. It is a visual narrative made up of bits and pieces taken from distant places that exist primarily as urban fantasies in our imaginations. Now Dubai, now Singapore, sometimes with a hint of the Manhattan skyline, all spiked by grand architectural flourishes, the idea of the world class city pushes us towards the model of the theme park or “special economic zones,” which achieve perfect order by forcefully containing the mess outside their boundaries.

High speed escalator to nowhere: Fusionopolis, Singapore.

This is unfortunately the vision within which the elusive “public space” is, quite literally, trapped today. In the face of the jumble of street life in India, we have now begun to respond, as urban designers did in Shanghai and Singapore (our model cities) by elevating private spaces away from the street and joining them through internal connections. These privately built spaces, whether residential or corporate, are firewalled and sterilized versions of the open commons of the street.

High-tech surveillance and codes of conduct insure a strict filtering of “the public” and tight control of its movements. These spaces are then gradually connected to one another by skywalks, subways, highways, and airways, leaving the “street” and its unruly “public” further behind and below. Interconnected shopping malls in Kuala Lumpur and airport-to-city connections in Dubai are full-fledged examples of these. The tentative plans for the “smart cities” to be built along the Delhi-Mumbai industrial corridor already show the same tendencies at work, which will favor a certain metropolitan “public” over a regional and local one. Eventually we find ourselves starved of the touch of human interaction that always characterized our streets.

Aspirations to world-class status have sealed the fate of many fast-growing cities today. They have become exclusive zones in which most citizens, unless they have a great deal of economic power, are made invisible. And the veneer of still being a city, all air-conditioned and antiseptic, is maintained through privatized and inside-out architectural gestures made in the name of public space.

At the end of the day, all that remains behind is physical space designed to accommodate an idea of the public that has been stripped of its fundamental property: inclusiveness. No matter how much time, money or skills that go into the design of such a public space, nothing can replace the millions of contributions made by each and every user who carves it out over time.

Article by Matias & Rahul published in the Wall Street Journal blog today.

“Bombay is a crowd. But I began to feel, when I was some way into the city from the airport that morning, that the crowd on the pavement and the road was very great, and that something unusual might be happening.”

Every new visitor to Bombay, has had a similar observation to that of V. S. Naipaul, as he arrived in the city to write his dark, vibrant, and exciting travelogue, India: A Million Mutinies Now. He was introduced to a city of much warmth; a city of much chaos; a city of many people.

Ever since Naipaul’s experiences were documented between 1988 and 1990, an incredible process of transformation has continued to change the face of Bombay; now Mumbai. Many of the neighbourhoods of 1988 have grown into sky-scraping districts, embracing global connections and international faces. The faces of Naipaul’s “crowds” themselves have changed in so many ways, experiencing warm embrace, violent clash, and boisterous development. Some have become wealthy, while others have remained poor.

As urbanists continue to stretch and scrunch the literary fabric of today’s Mumbai, it is important to make reference to these wonderful works of the past. They remind us that documentations must be made of the city’s most cherished and personal vessels; its people.

Mumbai, “is a crowd”. But what do we see in the crowds of today?

That reality often exceeds imagination is well known. What is less often discussed is how imagination can transform reality. The urban realm offers infinite possibilities, at least in the mind. But what happens when multiple minds connect and start focusing on an idea from various perspectives, with the firm intention of actualizing it? What if that idea is stretched across the world, powered by information technology and substantiated by localized action? This is how wars, religious congregations, political campaigns, real-estate projects, festivals, movie shoots, parties and all types of creative-destructive events get realized.

A dark illustration of this capacity to actualize wild ideas is the Mumbai attacks on November 26, 2008. A small group of well-trained and hyper-determined youth navigated across the Arabian Sea and came ashore to Colaba, in South Mumbai. Equipped with state of the art killing machines, they put the whole city to a standstill for more than 3 days. They killed Mumbai’s top cops, hijacked police cars, twice and rampaged the city’s best hotels. Till the end they defied India’s best commandos. For a moment it seemed that the country’s entire army could not stop them. And the whole world was their audience.

The televised images of the attacks evoked a kind of senseless urban violence that had only been prefigured in Hollywood movies and video games like ‘Grand Theft Auto’ or emulated in US suburban school killings. The fact is that fantasies of radical transgression, including bombing and killing have always been part of a certain subversive imagination, which is particularly appealing to the youth. Especially those who have been brainwashed into negating their violent impulses, desires, drives, aspirations and ego-trips. Attraction to extreme violence, in fictional or actual form is often a response to an unbearable level of frustration caused by the repression of perfectly healthy impulses – impulses to do with expression of anger, creativity and active control of their lives.

It is unfair to expect any self-denial of these impulses from the youth. And it is even worse to lock them up in a world running on autopilot, where any sense of agency is deemed dangerous or impulsive. To them, such a world seems headed straight to a crash. So many youth across the world feel trapped in rigid urban and social structures; stuck in a reality that they are not allowed to reinvent. As a result they often respond passionately to fictionalized versions of reality, which are full of possibilities, including the most extreme and destructive ones. Most often these fictions remain in the realm of the imagination, but sometimes, when intent and determination are high enough, they do translate into reality.

All that is needed for this leap from fiction to reality to happen is an audacious idea, collective determination, a space for intervention and some special effects. That’s what we call the magic formula. It can be used in all kinds of ways. Not all of them as dramatic, psychopathic and morbid as the 26/11 attacks. In fact, it is so important to open avenues for creative-destructive expression and action in cities today. Otherwise youthful energy turns into frustration, alienation and violent expression of despair. We can use the magic formula to create a new reality, even when the odds are against us. The more we are able to do so, the less self-destructive we will be.

The space of youthful imagination is highly potent. It is like a fertile jungle continuously producing a million new audacious ideas. It is violent and exciting, destructive and creative, all at the same time. It is a space where one can get lost, discover, experiment and grow. A sacred grove of sorts, that one can come back to at any point in time to reconnect to a vital creative energy that helps accomplish wonders.

The workshops we organize draw on the radical aspirations of the youth to a different future. They open up a  time and space for individual and collective expression through bold interventions in the urban realm. They break up existing social, cultural and political hierarchies and modes of subordination, at least for a moment. The workshops are intensive 3 to 5 days long events which bring together people from completely different linguistic, cultural and economic backgrounds. They exchange local and global knowledge in search of uniquely suited solutions for specific sets of issues. The result comes in the form of a multimedia explosion (interviews, videos, stories, music, drawings, architectural renderings, photoshopping, images, etc) that sends shockwaves throughout the system. Successful workshops lead to the creation or consolidation of local initiatives, which we continuously support by deploying Web-based networking and communication tools. These can help maintain the momentum of the workshop by keeping human connections alive and by giving global visibility to local projects.

Our next workshop will happen in Mumbai in the last week of November. In May, we are planning a workshop in Geneva in the neighborhood of Les Paquis, where residents are struggling with a new brand of street violence (yes, Switzerland has it too!). In June, we may be doing a workshop in the Bay Area in California with our friends from the Center for the Living City. After this we are hoping to do something in Amsterdam, Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires. Lots of explosive creative potential out there!

If you have a feeling that tells you to act now, to project yourself onto the world around, express your dreams, defeat your fears and realize your aspirations, please join any of our workshops. Better still, call us to your neighborhood… invoke the Urban Typhoon. Unleash the global imagination in your hillside favela, your suburban township, your artist hamlet, your satellite town, your generic city, your urbanizing village… They are all fascinating and full of potential. All they need is a little magical urbanism.

Its a familiar argument. Do you buy class with money or is it something that emerges through unconscious or conscious acts of creativity and charisma? (Both non-quantifiable and subjective categories.) No wonder its been difficult to answer the accompanying question: What makes a city classy as opposed to simply having global standards that allow a few thousand businessmen to have a great travel itinerary and comfortable homes when conducting businesses in far off lands?

The qualities of charisma have – as have so many other intangibles – tried to be captured into auditable categories. These are audit times, as some anthropologists have suggested. When the great intangibles of the world – quality, excellence, values, education, knowledge, nobility, have to prove themselves through measurement if they have to sustain themselves in the competitive and tough world of living.

In the realm of urbanism, these have translated into huge investments made in the realm of arts and cultural practices, public spaces and great architecture. And yet, like all audited and intangible values – the practice and experience of the charismatic city slips through the quantifiable categories, allowing for precious funds to be drained off as well.

Or is that an oversimplification?

The URBZ website takes off into cyberspace this week. With no loud explosions, no fire and lightning. Just a quiet floating off from its web-lab and field-sites where it was being built, evolved, brainstormed and experimented along with a series of activities and initiatives we conducted in cities, studios, streets and beaches all over the world.

The massive global virtual network that is the world wide web has been visualized as a version of galactic expanse. Its virtuality gives in to easy interpretations as being somehow above human life. However, a closer look reveals it to be a connection of minds, thoughts and experiences – a connection of people and their lives through an intricate, interactive communication network.

No wonder some prefer to think of the virtual world as an underground channel, rooted as much as possible in the tasks and travails of human engagement. Still others see it as mirroring our lives in all capacities. Sometimes it emerges in our dreams as one huge gigantic city, with billions of labyrinthine streets, alleyways, roads, bazaars, and homes, full of teeming human energy, producing, interacting, exchanging, copulating, living lives. Either way, the most important thing about it is that it is a system that simultaneously feeds and is fed by the energy of its users. That is what makes it so potent. That’s what makes it possible to think of it in a variety of ways, makes it possible to be used so diversely, in a myriad of  styles, for so many things. There are few systems which actually invite people to contribute to the collective process of growth.

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