Delhi at Dawn, Berlin at Dusk (2019)

In this paper, I argue how gardens provide an alternative vision for living in the city, and my take is grounded on its framing as a heterotopia. Foucault mentions how heterotopias are saturated spaces, yet ultimately spaces that mirror everyday life, forming spaces of repression, deviation, purification, of ultimately of time. Its functionality is present within itself to be a microcosm, such in the case of the garden: being part of the city yet outside of it. This is something I posit in contradistinction to what I consider as a kinetic utopia that subjugates the city. I use Hartmut Rosa’s three crises of modernity – appropriation, acceleration, and activation – to further my discussion of a kinetic utopia and to frame how burnt-out forgetfulness, accelerated progress, and unlimited increase are fundamentally the problem of the city subjected to infinite mobilization. Against this backdrop, I argue that the garden is the laying bare of society, the necessary opening to danger, to vulnerability bringing forward remembering or resonance, slowness, and releasement. To argue this, I provide three views on the garden that make it stand in opposition to the crisis of a kinetic utopia. The first view is a focus on the Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, Pakistan. This provides the Islamic perspective as a hint at the remembrance of paradise lost and paradise to come. With this, I similarly discuss the views of the other two monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity, to present a peculiar tension between the present, the past (the Fall), and the future (as eschatological vision) within the garden in order to highlight how its relation to the city provides a certain sense of remembrance. The second view is a focus on the Tuileries Garden in Paris, France, taking an everyday perspective. It is found in the middle of the axe historique, the historical axis from the Louvre pyramid to the Grande Arche. Its location at the heart of Paris provides the spleen of Baudelaire to get a grasp of the modern condition, however, with a particular emphasis on how what lies at the heart of the triumphalist march of globalization is a garden, an insight into slowness. Finally, the third view is a focus on the Ryoan-ji Zen Garden in Kyoto, Japan. This pays close attention to Zen Buddhism’s expression of freedom within the garden as a reflection of releasement. The movement from India to Japan has cultivated an awareness of a space dedicated to cultivating the interior and exterior of the structure, alongside some Daoist features, that reflect one’s own consciousness.

BETWEEN SENSE OF TIME AND SENSE OF PLACE DESIGNING. HERITAGE TOURISM, 2022

Urban public open-space design and the creation of atmosphere and environmental quality, together with architectural design, can contribute positively to the creation of a sense of place. The character of a place is certainly tied to the overlapping of elements that shape it but also to the events which have animated it and both the visible and invisible history which have crossed it. Therefore each place expresses in more or less perceptible ways a city’s sense of past. During the past 30 years, through several contemporary urban regeneration projects, public parks have had a decisive role in narrating the history of the place. In the city of Berlin, the object of our study, after the fall of the Berlin Wall4 in 1989, the void that was created in the urban fabric by the so-called Death Strip created the occasion for reflecting on a vacant land design project.

Colloquia. Journal of Central European History, XIX (2012): pp. 19-39., 2012

"The article discusses some of Berlin’s recent memorial landscapes. By examining some of the ways in which the monumental engages with notions such as memory, rhetoric, nostalgia and iconoclasm, it explores different instances of the memorial landscape arena, as conveyed through monumental expressions of architecture, either as a symbol of a rejected past (Palast der Republik) or as the reenactment of the nineteenth century as a promise for a better future (Stadtschloss). The two urban situations reflect extreme attitudes towards urban memory and renewal, that both engage the question of memory as a central theme."

‘Germany is full of ghosts’, and Berlin in particular is a city constructed by layers of history and memory. As the city that shows most deeply the scars of the twentieth century, Berlin has struggled to re-create an architectural identity post-1945. The recently started replica-rebuilding of the Palace (raised to the ground by the Soviets in 1950) is just one example of the unusual approaches the city has taken. Concepts of authenticity and purpose are questioned in creating a palace for a country without a monarch. The opening of the Berlin Wall Memorial, with its reconstructed death zone also shows an attitude to the past that is caught somewhere between museum and Disneyland architecture; local residents are confronted once again with overlooking the Wall. At a time when West Berlin was removed from maps of East Germany, there were mass clearances of nineteenth century tenement blocks in favour of sixties satellite housing estates that made a complete break with history. In the late 1960s, history was once again promoted, partially in extremes – for example, in the reconstruction of the medieval town centre at Nikolaiviertel. The discord between urban planners and local residents is exemplified in Berlin. The city’s urban landscape is layered with multiple histories and memories and the debate regarding how to deal with this past is constant. This paper intends to investigate some of the approaches to urban space, which have focused on one element of Berlin’s past, in order to construct a particular urban narrative.

2005

This essay is a critical history and analysis of the architectural reconstruction of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz. My primary purpose is to ascertain if the site functions as an authentic public place. Though many factors contribute to this process, I concentrate on how well the architecture integrates aesthetics with cultural traditions and urban spatial planning. To determine what type of place Potsdamer Platz has become, I contrast it with renovated sites in East Berlin's Scheunenviertel (Old Jewish Quarter). Borrowing from Walter Benjamin's philosophy of experience, I argue that the authenticity of these public places depends on how well these sites preserve and present multiple pasts that can be useful and transformative for the diverse populations of the present.

The recent construction of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz represents more than the completion of Europe's largest single construction project in the last thirty years. Its realization in fact exemplifies a new form of urban development that marks a decisive shift in the form and process of urbanization. It defines the triumph of the synthetic city—a totally controlled environment, conceived and executed at a giant scale, realized in less than a decade, in which every activity, function, building, and image is preconceived to create an idealized fragment of urbanity. The development of the project was based on a complex interaction of public and corporate interests, and exemplifies the dominant role of privatization, the selective framing of historical events and artifacts, current tendencies of re-representation, and the forces of popular culture and entertainment to define the new terms of urban culture.

Uwe Skoda and Birgit Lettmann eds. India and its Visual Cultures: Community, Class and Gender in a Symbolic Landscape, Sage Publications,, 2018

This paper looks at two monumental structures built in Delhi in the past two decades- Qila Rai Pithora and 108 foot Sankatmochan Dham, a hanuman temple in Karol Bagh to understand how various discourses around city planning, middle class aesthetics, popular forms of religiosity, questions of inhabitation of space, histories and myths come together to configure these spaces. In doing so, it moves beyond the usual explanation of hinduisation of city spaces and opens up more ways of looking at spatial politics.

Ambiances, 2019

This article proposes an ethno-phenomenographic record combining writing and drawing. It examines a few contemporary atmospheres of the city of Berlin. We describe a selection of specific situations from the angle of sensorial experience and contextualize them with sociological, geographical and historical elements. Tackling some atmospheres characteristic of a city at a certain period of its history is not the same as trying to grasp the ways of living in it; therefore, our approach is neither sociological nor geographical per se. Elaborating on four specific cases and reflecting from our own perspectives, we will examine the hypothesis of a fragmentation of Berlin’s atmospheres, exploring the ambivalent meanings of such assessment. The method is ethnographic: we base our descriptions on direct observation and we confront our respective experiences in places physically circumscribed by architecture and urban forms, interspersed with multiple presences and interactions during the observed time sequences. The overall objective is also cooperative and interdisciplinary: the sharing of our own points of view and perceptions through drawing, speaking and writing as processes of building an account of urban phenomena, without erasing differences in perspective. Through this very partial selection of seemingly representative atmospheres over one Berlin summer, we sketch a nuanced portrait of the city that does not exclude criticism. Cet article, en combinant l’écriture et le dessin, s’intéresse aux atmosphères contemporaines de la ville de Berlin. Sans prétendre les saisir toutes, nous décrivons une sélection de situations sous l’angle de l’expérience sensorielle en les contextualisant avec des éléments sociologiques, géographiques et historiques. Aborder des atmosphères caractéristiques d’une ville à une certaine période de son histoire, ce n’est pas essayer d’en saisir les modes de vie : notre approche n’est donc ni sociologique ni géographique à proprement parler. À partir de quatre exemples concrets et limités, nous examinons plutôt l’hypothèse d’une fragmentation des atmosphères berlinoises, en explorant les significations ambivalentes d’une telle évaluation. La méthode est ethnographique : nos descriptions sont fondées sur l’observation directe et la confrontation de nos expériences respectives dans des lieux physiquement circonscrits par l’architecture et les formes urbaines, entrecoupés de multiples présences et interactions au cours des séquences observées. L’objectif est aussi coopératif et interdisciplinaire : le partage de nos points de vue et de nos perceptions, sans effacer les différences de perspective, enrichit mutuellement nos regards sur cette ville. Avec cette sélection très partielle d’atmosphères représentatives au cours d’un été berlinois, nous esquissons un portrait nuancé de la ville, qui n’exclut pas la critique. https://journals.openedition.org/ambiances/2667 Maxime Le Calvé et Olivier Gaudin, « Depicting Berlin’s Atmospheres: Phenomenographic Sketches », Ambiances [En ligne], 5 | 2019, mis en ligne le 20 décembre 2019.

edgehill.ac.uk

This book, as the editors suggest, is concerned with challenging the conventional images of a capital city that 'nobody loves', offering alternative images of Delhi originating from less predictable perspectives, alternative social dynamics and from other less conventional life ...

Astragalo. Cultura de la Arquitectura y de la Ciudad, 2020

Astragalo 27. Delhi and Its Inhabited Imaginaries. Architectures of Living Table of contents 0. Delhi and Its Inhabited Imaginaries. Living architectures Carla Carmona. Credits for the Illustrations (Martand Khosla’s Visual Article). Astragalo, a new era Articles 1. Delhi: Two cities, 8 capitals, 20 million residents and nowhere to go. Sohail Hashmi 2. Brown and Blue, with Lots of Green: Gurcharan Singh and Making a Place of New Delhi. Annapurna Garimella 3. At 75, New Aspirations for New Delhi? Chintal Sharma 4. The Lahori Gate Polyclinic, New Delhi, INDIA. Building for an inclusive city. Martand Khosla 5. Creative Expressions from the architectural landscape of working-class settlements. The Experience of Ankur-Delhi. Jaya Shrivastava, Prabhat Kumar Jha and members of Ankur Collectives. 6. The micropolitics of an ‘Adda’ for women in India: Shaheen Bagh. Pratishtha Singh 7. Invisible People and Architectures of Delhi: Stories of a Shifting Workforce. Meeta Mastani 8. Navigating the City: Rituals, Routines and Relationships in the Making of Delhi’s Ordinary Streets. Samprati Pani 9. A topography of survival: 1984 and the making of a street in Delhi. Sarover Zaidi Book Review A call to ephemeral urbanism. Maíra C. Daitx About The authors Carla Carmona. University of Seville. Philosopher and artist. Maíra C. Daitx. Architect. University of São Paulo PhD. Candidate. Annapurna Garimella. Art, Resources and Teaching Trust, Bangalore and Delhi Sohail Hashmi. Freelance writer, filmmaker and heritage activist. Martand Khosla. Architect, RKDS Meeta Mastani. Bindaas Unlimited Samprati Pani. Shiv Nadar University Chintal Sharma. Architect, Shodh Design Workshop Pratishtha Singh. Member of the Advisory council of Guarini, Department of Political Science for John Cabot University in Rome, and All India coordinator for the Congress Party