design. This is not about the city of the rich and
poor, or the regular models of the formal and
informal, or other such binaries often used to
explain cities in South and Central America,
Asia and Africa. Rather, it is about the “kinetic
space,” where these descriptive concepts
collapse into singular entities and where
meanings are ever shifting and blurred.
The question for architects, conservationists,
urban designers and planners then becomes:
can we design for this ambiguous space? Can
we design with a divided mind? And, more
importantly, how might we be inspired by
the design intelligence of the kinetic city to act
and intervene as designers and activists in
our own localities? Can we use design to
construct soft thresholds that facilitate
porosity both socially and spatially? It is as
Martha Chen advocates, in the context of
economy: “What is needed, most fundamentally,
is a new economic paradigm: a model of a
hybrid economy that embraces the traditional
and the modern, the small scale and the big
scale, the informal and the formal. What is needed
is an economic model that allows the smallest
units and the least powerful workers to
operate alongside the largest units and most
powerful economic players.”^5
Pluralism and coexistence
Pluralism of form and its coexistence are
inevitable in a democracy, as are collisions
between differing forms of urbanism in close
adjacencies. Thus, dissipating these polarities
and softening thresholds between these
disparate forms of urbanism are the essential
design challenge. Facilitating the connections
and networks between diverse forms is one
way to promote these synergetic dependencies.
Can borders be deconstructed and softened, and
can boundaries be dissipated spatially?
Could this become the basis for a rational
discussion about co-existence? Or is the
resulting urbanism inherently paradoxical?
Is the coexistence of these differing forms of
urbanism and their respective states of
physical utopia and dystopia inevitable? Can
the spatial configuation of how this
simultaneity occurs be formally imagined?
Or is it inevitable that cities will be molded in a
singular image — where architecture is the
remarkable spectacle of the city? It was in this
duality-charged environment, where “many
times” co-exist simultaneously and are
compressed, layered and juxtaposed with each
other, that the beginning of our practice can
be found. In the early years of the practice,
research became the predominant activity; it
was the mechanism to understand the city. We
looked at architecture and urban history, and
documented historic areas as well as
contemporary urban centers and buildings.
We worked with conservation legislation,
interacted with local historical groups,
developed policies for recycling land, and
engaged an entire gamut of activities that
familiarised us with the problems of the city.
Through these engagements we were
exposed to the different worlds that existed
in the city and the different “times” that createdPhoto Rajesh VoraThis page: Hathi Gaon in
Jaipur — housing for
mahouts and elephants
Opposite page, top: An
ancillary building at the
Taj Mahal, Agra, was
restored for a Visitors’
Center; bottom: Three
Court Weekend House
in Alibaug