‘Urbanism’ is man made. Its evolution is organic. It produces its own culture. It inhabits its own precedent. The greatest achievement of urbanism is its ability to solve problems of human inhabitation / settlement. Its greatest aspiration is to inhabit an environment totally man-made.

Urbanism is a constant process of making, inhabiting and archiving built environments or urban forms, with each archive setting a precedent for future iterations.

An urban form, in this context, is defined as a moment within the social fabric that

• encourages human settlement
• develops its own local economy ( of various currencies)
• incubates actors and agencies that produce new cultural experiences

‘People of .. : and ‘places of .. : are subsets of urban forms. They co-author a unique culture that represent a particular period of time. The cultural capital of a moment in time, does not follow the linearity of function but an extrapolation of human imagination, as imagined by the artists, writers or poets of the time. ‘Could be Urbanism’ is a project that forecasts the potential of five urban moments to become urban forms, while grounding their realities in the present.

You are here
you are in the city
you are of the city

city is smart
city knows where you are even when you don’t

city is smart
city locates your place
even when you are trying to find yourself

city has a city of its own that is an excess of itself
you are a part of both footprints

city was made today in an instant
what are you in this instance

there is a village within a city
the city was drawn around the village you are in an urban village
you inhabit a conundrum

practices are traditional tradition has a lineage
what are the urban practices?
where lies its lineage?

Participating Artists

Rashmi Sawhney

Kaushik Bhowmik

Juneza Niyazi

Akshaya Narsimhan

WALA
Niroj Satpathy