At most times the urbanologist and the anthropologist are one and the same. For us walking the streets of old neighbourhoods in ancient or futuristic cities and the forgotten paths of history in far away places happen together. An assignment to Indore in central India, for the Aranya project saw us make a detour to mythic Mandu (Madhya Pradesh). Basically ruins of an old kingdom, the splendour of the place was accentuated by the lush monsoon greenery which gives the region that fantastic hue of green. It is deceptive, since it does not indicate the dryness it is also capable of declining into, just a few months later.

Mandu of course, on a weekend was overrun by tourists. This pushed us to look beyond and we had our customary airoots adventure that took us on a journey into the primeveal past of most cities. A journey through time that connects forests, collective memory and cities into one holistic moment. In four hours of driving time we could span habitats that nestled next to each other but lived in different centuries.

The Mahua Tree

Mahua, that magical tree which epitomizes the core of the colonial-tribal encounter yielded the most delicious intoxicant we had ever tasted. A nutritious drink made from the flower of the Mahua tree – also known by that name – came to us in a leaf cup. The making of the drink was banned by the colonial authorities in the late 19th century because it made the independent minded Bhil communities  that lived in the region even less dependent on a monetary labour economy that the authorities were intent on pulling them into. They licensed the making of distilled liquor only so that the communities could be addicted to it and had to pay and thus work for cash. Devious.

The colonial legacy lives on. Mahua making is not banned, but it is trapped in a moralistic, anti-drinking rhetoric that is the very opposite of the spirit of the tribal communities that love it. So it goes a bit underground.

We are sometimes blamed for being idealists. We spoke to the Bhil girls and boys, shepharding goats on the hills, and told them that our belief that there is something valuable here is often called delusional. They laughed. They told us they are really quite happy to be here on the hills, as long as their connections to the forests are not tampered with. No one likes going to the city and being pulled into doing physical work for the construction industry, something they have to do for survival, especially during the summers.Their presence in the forests around is discouraged by the authorities on the grounds that they will denude them.

The forest policies in India remain anti-people and to our minds are at the heart of a faulty policy that creates forest-less cities and people-less forests.

Generous Hosts

Bhil Pride

This experience will definitely inform our next paper that we are working – on to be presented at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, in November 2011 about the connections between the jungle that is Dharavi and the jungle that is the Borivili forest sanctuary in the metropolitan limits of Mumbai.

Our collective ancestral home

Collage produced by participants in the community arts programme initiated by KHOJ in Khirkee

The idea of the urban system as discussed by Anthony Leeds, frames Delhi’s special urban history and habitats like Khirkee, in an interesting way. He rejects the idea that such villages were ‘rural’ spaces. He sees them as functional components of political kingdoms that were ruled by powerful, urbanized centers.

If political kingdoms were urban systems, Delhi was one par excellence, way before it reinvented itself in the twenteith century as a suburb of its own past in the form of New Delhi.

Unfortunately Delhi’s dynamic urban past sits uneasily with its bureaucracy mired and aggressive modern avatar.

Khirkee village – Window village – in a literal translation (deriving its name from the Khirkee Masjid built in the sixteenth century) is a large heterogenous collection of neighbourhoods weighed down by contemporary India’s confused official stance on what its urban life should be.

You see in its present, signs of dynamic civic initiatives in the last few decades, as the older village morphed into buildings and parks and decent roads thanks to the contribution of its several dominant communities. You also see familar middle class zealousness in guarding boundaries and some contempt or pity for its poor cousin, the unauthorized Khirkee extension.

Unauthorized colonies can be so for a number of official reasons ranging from being transgressive of history (ASI, The Archaeological Survey of India,  believes that the monuments deserve more civic respect through substantial evacuation of civic life) to being hostage to local officials who find it more remunerative to keep colonies in that unstable status. They are also unauthorized since processes of authorization are slow. The gaps in time are filled in by over eager builders and local landlords who make a quick buck by pushing construction activities  through bureaucratic hurdles and then get entangled in them.

During this process, the relative depression in real estate value, makes it ideal for new migrants to come and rent and live and set up shop – or even buy. A walk down Khirkee extension makes you see global faces along with regional migrant communities making it a truly cosmopolitan neighbourhood. And yet, its unauthorized status also means living with bad civic amenities, overflowing drains, uneven and crater filled roads and diseases of all kinds.

Things simply do not have to be this way. The sincere initiatives taken by so many of the residents of the neighbourhood during the last decade do not have to end in disaster. But for things to go in any other direction we need to go beyond the obvious and we hope that the workshop, with all your inputs, can enrich and exploit our understanding of this neighbourhood, its ability of transcending an undervalued urban past, its harnessing of the regenerative potential of community art initiatives and its explorations of the most genuine processes of participation in civic life.

The Urban Typhoon Workshop 2010, in New Delhi is being co-organized between URBZ and KHOJ and will be held in Khirkee village.

This sentence stayed with us since we first heard it from Yehuda Safran, one of our mentors and inspirations. We were at a workshop in Taichung, the third biggest city in Taiwan, which aimed at producing ideas for a leftover industrial site called TADA. While the site was not itself in the periphery of Taichung, the city certainly was in the periphery of Taipei the capital city, and Taiwan itself is in the periphery of China. At a time when all eyes are turned to the urbanizing dragon, what meaning could this dead site in an unknown city in a doomed country really have?

Well, it probably has as much meaning we can infuse it with. We imagined how much of a place of creation that old industrial site could be and devised 99 rules to preserve freedom and stimulate the imagination. We were so stimulated by that place onto which we could project our wildest dreams that we produced a small book, the TADA Manifesto, in four days. For a moment that abandoned brewery in the middle of nowhere was the most inspiring place on earth. It was full of potential because we could make it ours.

New York was creative when no one was looking. SoHo, The East Village, the Lower East side in Manhattan and more recently Williamsburg in Brooklyn were cultural hotbeds for as long as the city was bankrupt and these places were ignored. That’s when people like ABC No Rio and CBGB could squat buildings and Futura were spray painting subway tunnels, when artists that are now established, recognized and often not so inspired anymore, were still crackheads, rebellious gays, punks, bums and squatters. There was nothing there to see. No hype and no romance. These much venerated places were at the periphery of a city on the verge of a breakdown.

Now that New York is universally recognized as a creative city all we see instead of artists are art directors, graphic designers, ad producers and their like. Established and wannabe communication professionals, commercial artists and other marketers come enmasse to such cities, where they know there is an industry that can use their know-how. Rather than breaking new grounds this so-called “creative class” recycles tired clichés and remixed proven formulas. New York is good at attracting people from elsewhere, but doesn’t breed much local talent anymore. Of course just like everywhere, pockets of innovation remain. New York is big enough and its periphery is full of creative tension and driven people. But as a rule, creative work seems to happen where no one is looking.

Some type of “observer effect” seems to be at work. Once too many people start observing and pointing out how creative a place is, it stops being creative (Berlin is recognized as one of the most creative city in the world right now. That must be the beginning of the end). Nothing messes up the creator’s work more than attention to the public and the media, let alone the market. What will they think? Should I be more/less explicit? Is this over the top? How can I justify my creation? How can I make it a commercial success?

The creative process is profoundly egocentric, free and subversive. It seems to come from a visceral need to project the self onto the world, but only really for the self’s sake not for the world. The world can go to hell. Indeed the creative act is usually destructive, at least the risk of destroying what’s around can’t stop it. As the creator dives into the self and indulges in the most gratifying self-expression, he abandons himself and the world to his creation. As if the creation had to happen at all cost, even at the expense of the creator’s own existence. Creation drives the creator, not the other way around.

Take for instance what is happening in the periphery of Geneva at the moment, at the CERN, where scientists have built the world’s largest and highest-energy particle accelerator complex (LHC). They try to confirm the existence of the Higgs Boson, a hypothetical massive scalar elementary particle that exists only in their theories by recreating the condition of the big bang. The experiment was supposed to start this month but because of technical problems it is delayed. We’ve heard that some scientists had concerns about the possibility of this experience creating a black hole that could grow and swallow the universe. Of course CERN-commissioned safety reviews have concluded that the risk of complete destruction of the universe is extremely small, even smaller than the possibility of a technical problem happening at the LHC.

After all, it would be a shame to call off the experiment after so many people put so much passion into it, right? In fact they can’t stop it. They are absorbed already. The drive to create is what keeps us going in the face of emptiness and what drives us into it. When there is nothing but a hole at the center, our best hope is the periphery.

Download the Tada Manifesto (41 MB)