The Delhi Urban Platform hopes to allow new ideas cross over.
Platforms often shape deep impressions of the city. Long ago, before 1857, Delhi was typically approached across the river, over a bridge of boats with a platform laid over them. The minarets of the city rose with the approach. A decade later, new arrivals in Delhi stepped onto the platform of a brand-new railway station, with a view of the Queen’s Road scything through the city and the Victorian-style town hall. The platforms of Delhi’s modern train stations are still the staging points for new Dilliwalas’ expeditions into the metropolis. They provide a place of pause, vantage and entrance into a new city.
A new initiative, the Delhi Urban Platform, intends to provide something similar – an entrance into new ideas for the city. It’s a mobilisation of ideas by key groups working on Delhi’s urban condition. As we run panting towards the Commonwealth Games, it’s not easy to hear much over the megaphones of the Delhi government and the MCD, the Courts and the media. Yet the city is swarming with ideas. “Delhi has, by some miracle, discovered it’s a city,” said Ravi Sundaram, an urban media scholar and DUP coordinator. “The idea is to have a critical urban debate, and the climate is perfect for it.” Calcutta had such a debate in the nineteenth century, and Mumbai has had one for a long time, he said, but in Delhi it is something new.
Sundaram moved here in 1980, just before another period of churning in the city – the ’82 Asian Games and the ’84 Sikh massacres. “Groups [were] fighting the demolitions, there was a public debate after the killings, but there was no true urban debate.” Through the ’90s, Sundaram watched a new consciousness grow as city news acquired importance, was given taller headlines and moved to the front of newspapers.
Thirty years later, Delhi is acquiring an identity, which many residents – and even more non-residents – thought impossible. DUP wants to intellectually nourish that process, with sessions on any area a group is working in: the city and land or the city and language, the arts or the courts, archaeology or waste. After the introductory session, themed “The Image of the City”, is “Transport and the City”, coordinated by architect and planning scholar AG Krishnamenon. It will discuss a traffic-restricting transport model, currently being tested near the New Delhi railway station – a plan that might reclaim the view from the station’s platforms for the people stepping off them. Raghu Karnad
“Image of the City” is on Fri Feb 19 at Sarai-CSDS. “Transport and the City” is on Fri Feb 26 at Indian Social Institute. Call venues to confirm details. See Listings in Around Town.
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