Prayas Abhinav draws from elements of Delhi’s rich street culture and prototype some ways in which the streets can become spaces for sharing, expressing and dialogue. In the architect and planner’s grid, streets become narrow parallel lines, used for getting from one place to the other. The temporary and fragile communities which exist around tea-shops and the street-side barber shops are not accounted for. In my projects, I experiment with the possibility of seeding networks and infrastructures that can exist around this temporary and fragile reality.

Pedestrians, street-children, pavement dwellers and their movements and actions are vocal elements of this street culture. I work with street-children near Jama Masjid to script new actions that they can perform on the streets. Growing and sharing food? Non-violent graffiti? How can we find ways of placing value on their familiarity, flexibility and invisibility?
He also explores roles elements like the canopies of tea-shops can play on the street. “Public space” never meant anything specific, it has meant anything from peripheral, unimportant, unusable to community space. Actualising and opening-up the meanings of the term is my ongoing interest. Demonstrating different meanings the term can take is one of the ways I do this.

Imbalances in urban environments, climate change and tactical strategies to address these are, I feel, intrinsically linked to interrogations of urbanism in its presently practised form and our individual dreams for our cities. Dreams are automatic and spontaneous, they cannot hold anything back and often faithfully communicate our desires. Spontaneous, iterative and sketching-based processes are closer to understanding how cities actually work and what might be possible ways of tackling tricky problems like climate change, water availability and the energy crisis. To even be considered problems, the street, the city, the country and the planet have to be understood in some way as zones with shared ownership and control. Anarchist and guerilla tactics have in some ways managed to do this. I call it the “cockroach approach,” referring to how cockroaches make our homes theirs, not needing parallel cities to be made for them.