Charting the Margins is a community-based practice that assesses and monitors public amenities, which comprise Delhi’s diverse public spaces with distinct women groups. Okhla and Okhla Phase II, located in Delhi's southeast district, are the pilot sites for this project. 

In our previous project, we worked with female street vendors in Raghubir Nagar.

While the focus of that engagement was to understand women’s mobility patterns impacted by rampant urbanisation, this project takes a step further to understand how governance and planning challenges shape issues of accessibility for women with unique circumstances in the urban setting. 

Delhi’s rapid urbanisation has been pushing the marginalised towards even more precarity. Recognising that plans dictating the future of urban environments are devoid of people and their complexities, we have intended to centre their issues on governance responsibilities and planning priorities. Cognisant of the social realities of class, religion, and gender, we wanted to foreground the voices of those under-prioritised in this city's governance and planning architecture. As an outcome, the initiative aims to co-create a Peoples’ Place Inventory across three scales: the individual, the neighbourhood, and the city, by zooming into everyday vulnerabilities and barriers to accessibility, which make travel, care responsibilities, work and leisure arduous for most women.

Thus, our project highlights community—and context-specific issues based on women’s perceptions of the quality of their public places in partnership with ASTHA (a local NGO based in Okhla).

Facilitated by Saleha Sapra and Anupriya Aggarwal, this socially engaged art practice is supported by Khoj Studios in New Delhi.