On HABITAT URBAN TRANSFORMATION LAB
HabitatUTLab seeks to engage in research, exploration, projects, activism, creative interventions, assertions in the process of transformation of cities, and education that challenges the foundations of contemporary urban thinking. We see planning and urban design as an instrument of change. We would like to explore this in a collaborative network of like-minded people who are willing to participate in the development of this idea through a local and global conversation.
A confrontation of multiple sensibilities is necessary for sharing urban space, especially in the public domain, where the nature of such spaces are biased in favor of specific interest groups. Powerful groups recede into their own gated enclaves, leaving a big question mark on the nature of public space and public domain.
Instead of the dominant model of the “inclusive” (atomizing) city, we seek to lay the grounds for a shared city. Public spaces should function as a shared territory in which the confrontation of sensibilities, interests and aspirations generates new and specific urbanities.The shared city should support livelihoods and establish claims on rights of use of public space. It is not simply “sustainable”; it is rapidly adaptive.
The ideal and commodity of the sanitized global city rests on an assumption that aesthetics are the province of people in power. The shared city celebrates the positive mutation that defies the implicit replicability in the idea of the sanitized global city and its aesthetic colonization.
—
SK Das
