As inhabitants of urban spaces and experiences, we recognise that public space in the city is in a constant state of flux – alternating between constant erosion and construction. We aim to engage with these complex dynamics along with the challenges and nuances that mark them. One of the primary quests for this program is to understand who exactly constitutes the public at which points in time? What are the various mechanisms and processes by which actors (like the State) invoke different kinds of public and for what purposes? We hope for the program to become a fertile ground for dialogue and interaction with different actors bringing to the fore multiplicity of uses, lived experiences and their intersections with academia, urban planning and cultural policy in urban spaces. Questions of gender, inter-class relationship and socio-economic inclusion/exclusion therefore become fundamental elements of investigation. Our approach would be to use a layer of creative practice to deal with the discomfort of a changing public sphere. Rather than delve into nostalgia for a “lost” public sphere and the abject accounts it tends to produce, we prefer to look at flux and instability as productive sites, as sites which are simultaneously sensitive to the violence of urban restructuring and attentive to the creativity of everyday practices of survival in the city. We will use a mix of media and artistic approach to engage with these concepts, with our material in the public and common domain for future use by others interested in similar journeys.
