The Maidan as a Ground of Design

The Maidan as a Ground of Design

Besides dividing with clarity, the geographic line also calls out things on the earth surface; things that are then treated as beings in their own right. The river is one such thing. The geographic line defines it from source or sources to sea. Once called out it is appreciated as a being that changes course, floods, dries up, can be made a subject of study, and can be considered a spine of ecologies and cultures. The city is another such thing. Once delineated as an occupant of the earth surface, it is seen to change, grow, decay, relate to other things, and, like the river, violate what lies beyond its ‘self’; it is made an object viewed from various angles views and represented in many ways such as sections, perspectives, photographs, assemblages, statistics; it features as a subject of inquiry and comparison in many disciplines; it can be situated in a context such as a region, country, empire, network, field, or text each problematizing it in ways, each affording a critique; it is made available for appropriation by an urban imaginary, featuring today in an array of ‘urbanisms’, each advocating a reading of it, a way to solve its problems and envision its future; and finally, it offers a ground for efforts to re-constitute it ‘differently’, in terms of flows for example or as Michel de Certeau famously does in terms of the ‘everyday practice’ of walking. The institutional practice of mapping, he says, affords a unified whole that lends itself to deterministic ‘strategies’ whereas walking affords an immersion that constitutes the city through tactics, defying its determination and allowing for a multiplicity of engagements. Similar arguments have been made with other everyday practices (and practices made everyday) such as dwelling, drawing, photographing, etc. The possibility of reconstituting the city has spawned a veritable industry of ‘mappings’ that attempt to visualize settlements in ways other than the view from above and by means other than a bounding geographic line. The city here becomes a ‘flow space’, a ‘data scape’, a ‘field of intensities’, a ‘heat island’, a ‘pollution cloud’, a ‘gathering of stories’, and so on.

But even as the geographic line has served the city, it has also created ‘lesser’ settlements where civil disagreement is somewhat challenged. This is the case with the village. No one today will say that it is an uncivilized place; but the fact is that the geographic line is not forthcoming in the kuchha conditions that prevail here. The word kuchha refers to things that are unfinished, uncertain and seasonal. Their form is ambiguous, making them difficult to geometricize and measure with precision. Included here are things like agricultural fields, ditches, dirt tracks, mud and thatch dwellings, forests with their monsoonal variations, deserts with their shifting sands and mountains with their erosive surface. Surveyors hesitate to plot these things on a map and if and when they do it is with considerable simplification in form and evening out of changes in time. They do not face the same difficulties in the city, however, where things tend to be by contrast pucca, meaning finished, firm, and permanent but importantly having clear and distinct outlines – brick and concrete structures, paved roads, walled lots, etc. It makes them easier to measure and draw to scale on a map. If the kuchha exists in the city, it is either introduced intentionally within boundaries as in the parks of the 19th century which were argued to bring nature into the city or an aberration as in the ‘urban blight’ of squatter settlements and shantytowns and ‘urban wilds’ that result from abandonment.

It is then not surprising that in India, where the village despite not considered uncivilized continues to be taught to be a lesser settlement in terms of literacy, economic opportunity, cultural diversity, innovation and connectivity, the pucca proliferates. It proliferates in urban sprawl but also in emergences in rural areas – brick and concrete buildings, paved roads, walled lots, SEZs, and new cities. These emergences of the finished and firm can be seen to further the trajectory of development; but they can also be seen as the act of settling operating through the means of the map.

The map that today extends across the entirety of the Indian subcontinent reaches back to at least the time of Alexander. He arrived in India in the 4th century BCE seeking the things afforded by the geographic line such as cities and rivers. He sought them as much for empire as for empirical knowledge. These were things that he could make subjects of study but also of control. However, settling water and people was an extraordinary undertaking in the world of the monsoon where practices like rains demanded a high degree of elasticity. His ambition to impose the geographic line here proved too much for his men who forced him to turn back before making it beyond the waters known as the Punjab (‘five waters’). Others though would take on his task, the most earnest effort being made two millennia after him by the English East India Company. They did not just seek to settle subjects; they sought to settle the entire surface of the subcontinent – confining water to river channels and their extension in canals, drains and pipes, defining settlements, delineating properties, territorializing places of natural resources, etc.

The making of this settled surface was led by Major William Lambton through the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India (GTS) in 1800. It promised, he wrote to Lord Wellesley, Governor General of the East India Company’s possessions in India at the time, to measure the earth’s curvature for the purposes of science as well as provide local surveyors with ‘fixed’ points which when “laid down in the exact situations in which they are upon the globe, all objects of whatever denomination, such as towns, forts, rivers, etc., which have a relation to those points, will also have their situations true in latitude and longitude.”[18] A century later, Colonel Thomas Holdich, a celebrated surveyor of the northwest frontier in India, declared surveys like Lambton’s a necessity. It made the earth surface indisputable. This survey presents, he says, “a final record which admits of no argument, and from which there is no escape. Every point on a boundary-line, every peak in a mountain system, every landmark of any importance in the countryside, has a value whose correctness can be proved just as easily in a London office as in the open field. And this value is not only incontrovertible, but absolutely distinctive because every point on the whole world’s surface has its own special position in terms of latitude and longitude, with which no other point can interfere.”[19]

The maps of the GTS initiated by Lambton and extolled by Holdich have been relentlessly refined and extended over the years with better instrumentation, accuracy and detail. With technology the frequency of this renewal has changed from decades to years (as in Google Earth imagery) to real-time captures. Combined with new technologies of surveying, it has increased the surveyor’s ability to measure and project more complex surfaces in shorter time frames. The things that surveyors once avoided for reasons of their ambiguity and change are becoming more and more possible to locate on a map that is today a changing computer screen rather than a sheet of paper. If the pucca here is captured in the static geographic line, the kuchha is captured in the dynamic geographic line.

The geographic line has then generated a settled surface upon which the city has a privileged place as do its parts and the various wholes of which it is a part, such as districts, states, nations, continents. Also held on this surface are the city’s associates, notably rivers, catchment basins, and nature reserves; ‘natural features’ such as mountains and seas; and a range of lesser settlements from towns to villages and with the mapmakers reach into the kuchha, the temporary settlements of nomads and squatters. Today, it is on this surface miniaturized on computer screens and smartphones, that designers and those whose knowledges they depend on in the fields of science, social science and humanities engage in ‘urban design’. They do so not just when they intentionally ‘design’, but when they simply record their experiences, observe changes, read and translate texts, define problems, and communicate ideas. It is here, amidst the proliferating things of a settled surface, that we revisit the maidan.

The Maidan Revisited

The urban imaginary has thrived in the singular image that people inhabit the earth by settling. It is an image that has become a widespread belief, underpinning much that is taken for granted not only in design and planning but also in how places are spoken of and written about. It holds India (and the world) in its grip today, bound to the city as the quintessential settlement so much so that it is difficult to imagine a world outside its frame. Here, the maidan in its demise offers a glimpse of an alternative. It refuses to settle. This may well be because it is a ground not beholden to settling; but it could also be because it entertains a multiplicity of material images and by extension, possibilities of inhabiting.

Appreciating the maidan then, not as an informal or appropriated space in the city, but a place that allows the cohabiting of multiple material images requires looking beyond not just the city but the settling imagery that keeps us bound to an urban imaginary. Critical inquiry has brought us to the limits of the settling image, exposing it to be a choice rather than necessity; a choice that has been operationalized and reinforced by various means, such as geographic maps, histories, infrastructures, descriptions, translations, prescriptions, indeed, the ways we are taught to experience things and the things we are taught to experience. It requires imaginative inquiry to go further, to explore other material images which have the potential like settling to build a frame and raise a world. Examples that we have engaged include splicing, anchoring, weaving, but there can be others yet to be explored.

Splicing is the act of joining two materials of the same or different kinds such as wood, rope, paper textiles etc. that does not draw attention to the joint, or the difference or similarity of the two sides, but the new singularity it constructs.

Anchoring is the act of holding together two material objects of different mobilities (one generally more stable than the other) such that it draws attention to a fluid zone between – water in the case of a boat, air in the case of a balloon.

Weaving is the act of interlacing material threads in two or more directions such that it draws attention not to the fabric produced so much as to the generating language of each side (eg., the distance, thread and rhythm of the warp and weft)

How are these acts imaged? It took the confinement of water to a channel with a geographic line and the separation of water from the soil it carried for Herodotus to see its ‘violations’ and to see soil settling across the line. And it took a meaningful extension to carry the act of settling from making a plain to making a city, community, history, etc. Is it possible to likewise image splicing, weaving or anchoring by engaging materials in a similarly structured way, allowing for an understanding and extension of meaning? Do these images generate new things, relations, practices, frameworks, knowledges, modes of representation in the manner that settling generated rivers, cities, histories, landscapes. These are questions pursued in the design studio, an explorative milieu that cultivates the imagination through material investigations and fabrications, and encourages reflection, revision, and projection of these into ideas and strategies through what is made. It creates the fertile ground for constituting new things and calling out the means by which to measure and value them. It encourages diverse starting points of inquiry that move from things known to things unknown as a practice of maidan.

There is ultimately a pressing need for imaginative inquiry. It opens possibilities for an India that is exhausted by an urban imaginary, confined to problems of settlement that only get worse by the day – loss of agricultural land, influx of rural migrants to cities, floods of rivers, scarcity of water, denuding of hillsides, displacement of people from dam sites and nature reserves, etc. – and to their re-packaged solutions which currently include smart cities, green environments, linked rivers, protected forests, intensive agriculture, etc. Imaginative inquiry promises not just a different view of things but different things. The studio here, becomes a place not to apply knowledge drawn from various disciplines whether to solve pressing problems, challenge situations or envision futures, but to constitute places in fresh ways, unbound by the ‘things’ of the urban imaginary.

We look at some examples from a studio undertaken in 2015 in the Western Ghats by students at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design.

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