Culture is like jam...

Bangalore International Centre has announced a competition and a call for ideas by architects across the globe. The programme is in essence an auditorium. This is a great opportunity for architects and designers to question the idea of public, performance and cultural space for today and tomorrow.

Culture is taken very seriously in India - it is the arts, dance forms, music, literature... - especially if they are based on Indian tradition and folklore it is even better. Below I am quoting from the competition brief:

"Modelled on the well established India International Centre in Delhi, BIC aims to become a knowledge hub in Bangalore for interdisciplinary intellectual discussions and cultural exchanges. BIC aims to fulfil the lack of a single platform that merges the cultural elite, the intellectual community, and the leaders of public opinion. It provides an inclusive interaction space for collective and cross disciplinary intellectual activity, cultural enterprises and innovations in development"

Well meaning superficial words - if any one has been to cultural exchanges in India and especially Bangalore one will be well aware of the incestuous community that it is - based on mutual admiration, cliquish affection, and back scratching. The same faces, the same views, the same pedantic way of looking at things and the same condescending attitude towards innovation and experimentation.

I would think that Pukar in India is one of the few think tanks and research communities that has experimented and embraced local thinking and pop culture.Maybe the younger architects who participate in the competition will question the role, form and exchange of culture today before subscribing to the rather limited brief with the aim of winning. 


Good luck - here is the link to the competition website.

Disability- are we so blind ?

Last week I had a crazy morning, in an hour I interacted with three disabled people and I was ill equipped to engage with it. As a person who spends most of the day at a desk surrounded by 'perfect' architects and evenings at sports facilities (gym/swimming pool) I rarely meet people with disabilities and I blame the environment that we live in. In Indian cities and I am sure in many cities across the world the urban environment does not allow for equal access for disability. This causes people like me to 'forget' that they live in the same space as us but are subjected to a life of isolation and invisibility.

Equal access is a very loaded word. You may have a ramp going into the building but if your toilets do not allow for a wheel chair that ramp is only good for healthy children to run on.

As architects we are trained to think of physical disability as the only parameter to consider while designing a space - providing ramps and choreographing movement so that they can get to most places in a building by following the yellow brick lane. They are not permitted experiences but rather are treated like vehicles - given a route and destinations.

Blindness or single eye vision is a subject that is often neglected completely in spaces - I cannot imagine many of the malls in Indian cities allowing a guide dog through their doors.... Another inherent flaw in architectural design of disability in India is the assumption that disabled people are always accompanied by a caregiver - I would think that, that assumption is flawed - this thinking is what keeps them at home because no body wants to be a caregiver all the time and no one wants to feel disabled all the time.

What is appalling to me is my lack of knowledge on the other forms of disability -  not purely physical that impede movement in space but that do not allow for experience in the spaces that we design - the inability to sense colour, inability to hear well, or read signs, cognitive disabilities, old age and all the problems that we experience with them - lessening of vision, arthritis.

We are not used to considering children as disabled - but the way that we design spaces in cities we could almost put them into that bracket - children are unable to function in our spaces - how many spaces have toilets that allow for someone shorter than 4' high to use them ? We design our spaces for healthy people between the ages of 14 and 50 or when we make an effort to be all inclusive we are blatantly banal and uninspired.

Architecturally, how are we to deal with the myriad possibilities of human disabilities? The article in the image shows the design of a cutlery set for specifically one kind of disability but how are we to think about this in the design of spaces? By creating multiple scenarios and not generic standards can we expand our spaces to be more inclusive?

Confrontation

On my recent trip to Pondicherry I visited Le Dupleix - a heritage hotel at the corner of Rue Suffren and Rue C....

Beautifully designed starting from the name plate of the hotel where the name is cut into steel and discreetly addresses the corner, beautiful entrance experience with pools of flowers floating in water and meditative interiors, white walls, glass and steel. A subtle experience combining the old and the new.

The food is very good. I ordered a mascarpone Risotto - delicious, subtle flavours. I would recommend it for sure - On Saturday evenings they  have a  French violinist playing live music (I did not know of it till the next day - so I do not know how it feels).

After absorbing all the subtlety and the beauty around - very suddenly an anomaly jumps out at you. The yellow plastic along the neighbouring construction site along with the loud Tamil music playing on not so well designed speakers that help to provide entertainment to the labourers there.

The yellow does a lot to camouflage the brutal crudeness (so maybe it was thought of or maybe it was the material that is available in Pondicherry) of the surroundings compared to the created calm, which I am sure that the typical blue plastic seen across Indian construction sites would not have been able to do - but it is also a spiritual moment in the design - the obvious failure in absolute control and the rise of the space of confrontation.

Pondicherry is a collection of these moments for me some designed (I cannot say if it was planned confrontation but they are designed spaces) and some self organised - The name 'bakers street' (with the legendary silhouette of Sherlock Holmes as mascot) for a french cafe on Lal Bahadur Shastry Street (formerly called Rue de Bussy), the heaviness of the interiors of the same cafe meeting the minimalism of the served french pastries; the jail like grill on the windows of Villa Shanti that form the threshold of designed space and undesigned space, the hybridity of the street between the gridded French quarters and the 'organic' (a polite word for unplanned) Tamil quarters;  .... The list is endless.

Pondicherry is a fragmented piece of land sited across  three states in South India governed directly by Delhi with some basic legislative local governance. The largest territory mediates between its role in Tamil Nadu and its role as a gateway to Auroville, a large intentional commune.

Confrontations have a unique role in life - they provide for a chance to move beyond the insularity of control and belief (about architecture, and object or even oneself). They shake the status quo, create chaos and drama and they inspire... Many designers and people shy away from this rather destructive, uncontrollable force - It would be impossible to know for sure the result of it, but I think that there is a place for confrontation in architecture, design and life.

So do we design the space of confrontation or do we allow it slowly curl up at the edges of openings and permeate a space ? Can a space of confrontation be designed like they attempt to design space for dissent in Singapore or place Graffiti walls in western cities? Is confrontation a space or a moment?

Are museums and galleries spaces of confrontation? Is the role of a curator to enhance these moments?

I am not an expert in this area of thought - (I am not an expert in anything really!) so this is a simple recording of a recent experience and interest.

Vote for your favourite architect! Seriously!

As media in architecture increases so does their need for content. Though magazines could generate content by curating information, framing architectural issues or simply critically evaluating the built environment in India the formulae here is simpler - awards.

The architectural firm usually participates by sending in entries either after paying for a membership or by paying for each entry. The magazine uses the money to organise the grand award event and at the same time ensures that they have content for the next year to publish within their pages without doing any work.

Architectural magazines in India are rarely critical - cynically I would say that it is because they do not want to pay for the content and people who would create content. The role of the architects in this system is equally disturbing.

The magazines are essentially catalogues of projects with little or no editorial system behind them. Many magazines do not even pretend to present a frame for viewing them.

With social networking we see another view to the process - voting. By voting for your friends you become active participants in their victory. You may never have seen the work of the other architects, may never have been interested in your built environment but that is irrelevant. To at least complete the sham the google docs that I published above could have had links to a small write up and compilation of work - but again that would imply work and thought!

Coco-Nut

India has a coconut development board that is a part of the agricultural ministry. Their main aim is to diversify the products that can be generated from the coconut along with increasing awareness of the products and the market share and provide funds for research to prevent disease and rotting of the crop.

For this mission, minimal processing of tender coconut water was developed in Kerela to ensure that coconut water is kept fresh for days after it has been detached from the tree. In Bangalore this service is provided by Coco Fresh to schools, corporate offices and hospitals. Their mobile dispensing machines are unsurprising very similar to the ones that were created by Fruit Hut Beverages for their brand Coco Fresco in Hyderabad. 

These mobile units seem very much in place in the synthetic malls that cover Indian cities, and the ‘streets’ in IT campuses, they provide employment and they ensure that a product that was essentially assumed to be available on the street has space in a completely different setting with a look to match the quality and ‘standards’ of that space. Coco Fresco has a series of drinks based on coconut water to create a beverage market for the simple coconut water and has created an exportable product and business. 

The irony is that, though they have while they try to diversify the market there are very few steps taken to keep the current coconut vendors safe in business. This is the fallacy of the system that ‘development boards’ go about to realise their mission. They eradicate existing working systems and introduce new systems rather than developing both simultaneously.

On the website of Coco Fresh and Coco Fresco it is rather amusing to read about the hygiene and quality that dispensing machines provide over the street side vendor. The street vendor uses a machete to slice the top of the coconut and pierce the shell just enough to insert a straw. The most unhygienic part of the ritual might be the straw (cheap plastic) and many opt to drink the coconut water directly from the shell. The meat is eaten post drinking the coconut water. The coconut shell is returned to the vendor and he slits it, forms a spatula from the shell to scoop the meat. The coconut is the container and then the crockery and cutlery. 

The movement of the vendor and the ritual of drinking and eating is at the most a 7 minute process when he is busy but it is mesmerising especially if the local vendor has the inclination towards showmanship, swinging his machete seamlessly, precisely and artistically across the shell of the coconuts through imaginary dashed lines. He is blessed as his product is healthy, appropriate for all ages and this is part of his aura. He is the medicine man of food, respected and proud. 

A coconut vendor is rarely mobile though it would be common to find him with a collection of mobile units. Usually armed with a tempo to carry the surplus coconuts and the waste shells, a pushcart to stock the products for view and baskets to collect the waste he waits at corners. At the end of the day, the coconut waste is dried and sold as fuel.

He is in essence a small business enterprise. The coconut vendor in Cooke Town has an agent in Mysore who buys coconuts from local farmers and then delivers the coconuts to him and possibly others in Bangalore. Fruit Hut Beverages has farmers or their agents delivering the coconuts to their warehouses in Hyderabad where their mobile dispensers are stocked. Both businesses collect the waste and sell them for further processing. Some coconut vendors employ staff to increase the area of business similar to the coconut corporates who employ people to operate their dispensers. 

I could imagine a system where the Coconut Development Board would issue a series identity cards bearing their mark to ensure that coconut vendors are treated as the business that they are and not continually harassed by police officers who like to exploit the anonymous in the name of city development. 

Also, I have noticed that in the city women rarely sell coconut water contrary to the Harry Belafonte song (it maybe because of the labour required)  maybe the Coconut Board can introduce motorised push carts for for them at low costs that they can wheel them from their home to their workplace.

Downsize me!

Carbophobics (fear of carbohydrates) would possibly not visit Javed Bhai the greengrocer on Milton street adjoining Basha superstore but they would definitely be noticed by him while they walk past him uncomfortably. During my 45 minute interview, one Friday afternoon with him, he waved and greeted continuously, gave directions and shared views and sometimes sold fruit. Bananas were the most sold during that time, being the cheapest and often in singles.

The consummate salesperson, he told me about his efforts (5am-noon at the wholesale city market to get the best quality fruits), geographical origin of his fruits (from America, China, New Zealand and across India) stressing on his experience to gauge the quality of a fruit by looking at it and his memory for all his customers preferences. 

His shop is a rather simple typical street greengrocer: stepped counters that pour in and out of the simple hollow semi-permanent shell, boxes of fruits against bright tinsel paper. One of the more unique attachments was the wooden door that stood forlornly across the street, that would be fitted to the semi permanent shell at closing time.

Approach to Javed Bhai's shop on Milton Street, Cooke Town.

Javed Bhai describing the variety of products in his shop

Street (stationary and mobile) greengrocers are very intuitive to the food habits and economic background of the localities that they cater to, as every locality is composed of people from different parts of the country with their own specific culinary requirements. Services that they offer is delivery, on order and most importantly neighbourhood security. 

In India, it is not difficult to buy small quantities of food products. The smaller the shop the greater the chance of buying individual pieces of any food. At some bakeries it is possible to buy a single cookie or even parts of a loaf of bread. This is the downsize me! phenomenon, possibly because of the low incomes, precise budgets, and lack of refrigeration in many houses. 

This is a service that is especially catered to by mobile greengrocers more than street side greengrocers (though they make exceptions depending on the produce). They will slice a watermelon, papaya, pineapple, jackfruit and you can buy what you need. This is what I believe ensures that fruits and vegetables are consumed a bit more democratically across the country. This is also a service I believe that could keep obesity and related health disorders down if made into an international health policy. 

Single distribution network for products as described by street vendors (stationary and mobile). WIP diagram as more retail points are studied

The Japanese do something similar, packaging individual biscuits in an endless expanse of plastic. Could we design food dispensers that somehow allow one to choose the quantity, the packaging and still retain hygiene standards?

Potemkin streets

Bangalore is a tapestry of neighbourhoods, each with its own rhythm and pattern connected to each other through motorised transport. I do not exaggerate this phenomenon, try getting across Richmond Road at peak traffic hours. 

Streets are imagined to be stages for transport and movement, spaces for passing through rather than pauses. Their typical form would involve two or more lanes for automobiles, a pavement of similar form allowing two people (maybe more if the road is wide enough) to walk side by side and greenery to soften the harsh glare of asphalt. Parked cars are grudgingly allowed if it is deemed to be good for business of the street but static people on the streets are not usually appreciated. This little description was not always considered the norm in urban planning and hence may not be consistently seen across the world, but it is often considered the unstated law in planning streets in India today. 

Pavements are rarely wide enough to accommodate spontaneous functions. Every street must allow the thoroughfare of motorised traffic irrespective of the width of the street and often the pavement may be sacrificed for this mandate. Motorised before non motorised, and movement before interaction. 

Streets may be spotted with basic programme that is considered part of the transport repertoire like bus stops and taxi stands. The lack of rubbish bins along most pavements attests to this thought. The nostalgia of streets as spaces of interaction are privatised as Potemkin streets across the city. UB street is one such famous street on the first floor of UB city, fitted with an amphitheater, cafes and restaurants, street lamps and curated interaction. With the gradual gentrification of the neighbourhood, the streets around UB city were slowly transformed into spaces of transit and UB city took over the role of the street for itself. 

There is no place for the un-choreographed in the 'planned cities' of India and this is true for street food vendors - who are incessantly harassed, exploited and removed. They swarm in spaces with pedestrians, unregulated and self organised to create a medley of complementary tastes. They obstruct the path of the pedestrian with smells and sights and provide cheap culinary diversity to the city and hence they are often regarded as menace to the movement on streets and an eye sore to the Arcadian image of the ‘street’.  

Street food vendors provide cheap food to the city, balancing the cost of living in the city and creating self-employment for unskilled people. They perform a service to low income workers in both the formal and informal sectors, students in the city who have limited money and tourists who want to try the ‘authentic’ fare. In cities like Bombay and Calcutta street food is a part of the diet of the city irrespective of income making it a part of the culinary traditions of the city. In Bangalore, the lack of a critical mass of street food vendors across the city limits the innovation and diversity that could be achieved through this medium. 

The relevance of street food in a city is not romanticised fiction but rather an established fact outlined by the National Policy of Urban Street Vendors 2009 by the Government of India and in the Guidelines for the scheme of the upgradation of the quality of street food sponsored by the same government (both are easily available on the internet). Unfortunately policy documents are only frameworks that can be ignored by state ministries across the country. Many NGO’s internationally and nationally help to organise and fight for the right of street vendors, calling for regulating and legalising them to prevent exploitation from both policemen and the urban mafia.

The Hindu on 19th of July 2010 highlighted the “New set of hawking rules from August” of the same year, proving without doubt the attitude that the High court and the Government in Karnataka takes towards this form of business in the city. The laws stated in the article as the court ruling are counter intuitive to business for a hawker by restricting them from areas that are pedestrian friendly and restricting them to ‘hawking zones’. A hawker does not need a hawking zone - they gather at zones that are best for hawking, though the creation of additional zones may create new identity and activity in the city. 

The vision document for the Masterplan 2015 of Bangalore clearly states that zones for street vendors have been recognised in the conceptualisation of the master plan, but I was unable to find a detailed plan or strategy that highlights where these zones are (They may still be on the drawing board), the number of hawkers that they can accommodate or data that justified the creation of those particular zones. 

There should have been a detailed project documenting multiple formats of street food that are available in the city and studied across other cities in the world, understanding the various social, physical and economic transformations that they have on the urban environment, and projecting further typologies of street food across the city creating identity and income for different neighbourhoods. The lack of this detailed information is the ambition of this project.