Articles by Kiran Keswani

‘Decoding Everyday’ is a citizen science portal which invites contributions from individual residents, student communities, RWA members and anyone interested to share their experiences and stories about streets and public spaces in cities. It is an initiative of the Bangalore-based Everyday City Lab (ECL) that was recently selected to be a part of the Citizen Innovation Lab’s (CIL) ‘Six-week Sprint’ within its Civic Tech program. Under this program, CIL supports initiatives to develop technologies that enable citizens to engage with the government and/or communities to work towards civic participation in governance. The Everyday City Lab recently launched a series of…

Bengaluru is increasingly becoming a city with more roads and flyovers, and with less spaces for public interaction or informal encounters. As in other Indian cities, here too, administrators imagine a city that meets global standards of urban form and infrastructure. Whereas, at the neighbourhood level, people continue to nurture and sustain spaces like ashwath kattes (peepul tree shrines), informally generating community spaces. And these spaces - which assimilate the rural within the urban - survive even as government agencies have been rampantly usurping public spaces for various projects. There are two competing processes in city-making – one, from above,…

In an article in LiveMint, ‘Of plagues, people and the everlasting impact of short events’, Anurag Behar, the CEO of Azim Premji Foundation writes, “We have not dealt with anything like this before, individually or collectively as a modern global society.” The article begins with a reference to William McNeill’s book on epidemiological history, Plagues and People that discusses the influence of diseases on the course of humanity. Behar writes about his chance encounter with this book at a Washington DC book store just a month ago and the turn of events thereafter.  As I read this article, I think…

The annual Chitra Santhe was held on 6th January 2020 in Bengaluru this year. Since 2003, the festival has been celebrating traditional and contemporary art and making it accessible to the public. It has brought art out of galleries and museums to the streets thereby reaching out to broader audiences. The art fair featured over 1,300 artists this year and is estimated to have had around four lakh visitors. For more details, see Yourstory. Artists from outside Bangalore - North Karnataka, Goa, Odissa, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala participate. The Kumara Krupa Road leading up to the Karnataka Chitrakala…

We are looking for two Full-time interns for this research project in Bangalore on: Ashwath katte (tree worship) as a sustainable urban space The research will look at the practice of tree worship which continues to be a part of the everyday life of the people in the city. Specifically, it will look at how the Peepul tree shrine and the raised platform around it, locally called the ashwath katte has developed as a sustainable urban space. Using spatial ethnography and oral history methods, we will attempt to understand how the katte can help sustain not only environmental practices but…

While there have been attempts to formally plan the growth of a city, this has not proved to be successful in many parts of the world. Informality does play a significant role in several cities, especially those that are in the emerging economies. For those working in the informal sector, access to capital is limited and resources are not plentiful. The informal worker or the street vendor therefore borrows from the public spaces of the city where no price or a small price can reduce or eliminate the overheads related to rent or ownership of a space. In a study…

On Sunday morning, we did a walk in the Basavanagudi neighbourhood. It was not an “early morning walk” but a walk that started only at 9am after breakfast was done. Just to make it a little easier for everyone. It was a walk conducted for my students in a course I'm teaching this semester on the Everyday City at the Azim Premji University. The open courses at APU are elective courses offered once a week over the semester for students in the Masters Programs in Development / Education / Public Policy & Governance. The focus of the Everyday City course…

In December 2016, a workshop on ‘Trees, Culture & Urban design’ was held in Bangalore as part of CEPT University’s Summer Winter School program. The focus of this 10-day winter school was to study the practice of tree worship in the city. Specifically, it looked at how people generate and sustain community spaces through worshipping the Peepul tree (Ficus Religiosa) shrine with its serpent stones and the raised platform around it, locally called the Ashwath katte. This workshop was based on previous research. The paper can be accessed here: The practice of tree worship and the territorial production of urban…

On the afternoon of 28th april 2014, I had set myself the task of observing two street corners at either end of Noronha road at Russell market in Shivajinagar - a corner at the Broadway street end and a corner at the St.Mary’s Basilica end (Fig.1). I am reproducing here what I noted and what I sketched there. These were ordinary activities. They probably happen everyday. I observed the urban space – how the vendors create their informal selling spaces on the street and how walkers/shoppers enter these selling spaces and engage in a bargain, a conversation or a purchase.…

The Samosa Mela at Shivajinagar is a study conducted as part of a CEPT-CPP Summer school on The Everyday City that was held in June 2016 at the IIM Bangalore campus. It was a collaborative effort between CEPT University, Ahmedabad and the Center for Public Policy, IIM Bangalore. As part of the two-week workshop, the participants worked in groups to identify & analyse the everyday activities on the streets in different locations in the city. The Samosa mela project was done by Drashti Amin, (Anant Institute of Architecture, Ahmedabad), Akshata Bhandiwad (CEPT University, Ahmedabad) & Suyash Bhardwaj (NIT, Surat). The…