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them. The State of Architecture (2016) as well as the State of Housing
in India: Aspirations, Imaginaries and Realities (2018) shaped an
argumentative continuity on the role of architecture, as well as the role
of the architect as a professional, as a cultural contributor. The pages
of this magazine, as well as the public arena of the Kala Ghoda Arts
Festival and its space for discussions have brought forth important
thematics to approach architecture and urban design — viewing new
practices, scouting the country on design, looking at generational
practices, gender and space, cultural conflict and space, challenging
notions of context, reviewing modes of practice and what we call ‘design’,
including reviewing the space and practice of discourse itself. Public
sphere has to be shaped out of an informed engagement with the field;
it can never be outside the broader and ideological understanding of
practice. It is after all also a professional engagement — with love and
passion for building a space of discourse, one needs to have a professional
approach and an educated one. Personal fantasies or commercial
enterprises use the public arena as a handmaiden for promotion: the
narrow-minded agenda of the self or a clique, glitter of commerce and
limelight. These are not at the service of building a vibrant field of
practice, they never can contribute to the lives of individuals and studios
as they struggle in the everyday world of practice and context. One hopes
that as attractive form is adopted and grabbed, people would pay attention
to the labour of building content, in the process of shaping a public
sphere of discourse around architecture, cities, history, and people.
The public arena for debating practice is most vital to the shape of a
field and the journey of many individuals participating in the production
of this field — as practice, but also as discourse. And it maybe time that
we develop a professionalism towards the understanding of fields of
discourse, the making and shaping of spaces of exhibition and conversation
that engage publics, networks of practice, and the world of ideas in an
ever-active cauldron of cultural and political extractions and interventions.