Developing Empathy in Place-making: Highlights from our four-year roadmap
I wanted to take a moment to share and reflect on City Sabha’s collective roadmap. Here's penning down our not-so-linear, four-year stint working and somewhat sprawling in the urban realm.
2020 - 2021
Riddhi Batra and I were building City Sabha—aligning our vision with our ideals—on the brink of the COVID-19 pandemic. We envisioned creating a multidisciplinary space (resembling our urban commons) for academics, think tanks, CSOs, designers and other social sciences disciplines to cultivate empathy in city-making and simplify the complexities our cities face today. We aimed to reimagine public spaces to be inclusive and sustainable in the Indian context when, shortly, we faced a massive ridge between public spaces and people’s everyday lives, adversely impacting work and mobility patterns experienced across communities and cities. For us, this propelled an imminent halt of all proposed action-based projects.
Understanding who our publics are, what constitutes the ‘publicness’ in a space, how certain groups access them and why public spaces- a fundamental building block of our city that encompasses many of our urban complexities- can be used as a portal towards urban change. The Main Bhi Dilli Campaign became a launchpad for our advocacy efforts. We campaigned for a public space chapter in the top-down planning paradigm. During this course, we had the opportunity to demonstrate how safe and inclusive markets can be reimagined amid lockdowns to open up workspaces for street vendors across three locations in Delhi. Parallely, we contributed towards stirring up a social media campaign and curated an open talk series called Ab Sheher Saath Banayengey! that helped disseminate the campaign’s voices among other cities, nationally and internationally.
2021 -2022
There is a lack of vision while planning and designing gender-inclusive spaces, which is why when women prepare the maps of a city, it looks invariably different. We found ground evidence when we established a map-making practice - Aao, Jagah Banaye! with female street vendors of the Waghri trade who have settled in North-West Delhi’s Raghubir Nagar for more than 30 years; their localised maps accounted for things that planners don’t look at—neglected streets, neglected parks, anti-social spaces and well-maintained streets—information that is crucial for women’s mobility in public spaces. We showcased their narratives and reimagined maps at Threading the Horizon at Khoj Studios, which exhibited first accounts of female street vendors negotiating space, facing everyday inequalities, and mapping their community via a Khaata, among other engagement tools such as soundscapes, photo-voice and zine-making. Subsequently, we published our generative inquiry in a series of articles called ‘Placing Work, Mapping Places’.
2023 - Ongoing
Our grassroots engagement shifted base to a geographically opposite end of Raghubir Nagar, in the southeast district of Delhi’s Okhla and Okhla Industrial Phase II. While the focus of our engagement in Raghubir Nagar was to understand women’s mobility patterns impacted by rampant urbanisation, this project took a step further to understand how governance and planning challenges shape issues of accessibility for women with heightened marginalisation and precarity, specifically, mothers of children with disabilities residing in ten sub-localities, in partnership with ASTHA. An outcome of the Charting the Margins initiative is to co-create a People’s Place Inventory across three scales: the individual, the neighbourhood, and the city. By zooming into everyday vulnerabilities and barriers to accessibility, the initiative aims to identify the obstacles that make travel, care responsibilities, work, and leisure arduous for most women. We concluded the project's first phase with Beyond the Blueprint - Reimaging the City showcase at Khoj Studios. Designing a primer that outlines a step-by-step approach to co-develop a place inventory and adapt in a community was a helpful tool to orient people to the nature and outcomes of our engagement.
Beyond our community practice, we’re consultants to CSOs today, where we adapt participatory action research methodologies to aid in strategising, implementing, and monitoring programs. We act as facilitators for communities to find productive approaches to collaborate with state actors to better design and develop public amenities in places and demand accountability for reallocating resources for prevalent issues negatively impacting the community. We support postgraduate and PhD students in exploring alternative people-centric methods to frame their research work. We engage young people via a curriculum called ‘People Planning Places’, an exploratory journey to inform and produce new perspectives, vocabulary, ways of thinking, and actioning principled urban change. We have curated this window of opportunity where urban theory meets practice with several public and private learning institutions.
This journey is shaped by a team of creative thinkers and doers—you know who you are! You will always have an imprint on our wayfinding and in challenging the status quo.
Last, I leave with a personal feat - I have learned to control my hopes. Making systemic change requires resilience over time, and working with diverse groups of people has made me gentler in my approach to life. I am grateful for the stakeholders, colleagues and partners I work with daily - they fuel my curiosity and lessen the burden.
