Light Infrastructures

Departing from the increasing necessity to address issues of urban marginality, structural violence, community disfranchisement, and now the global pandemic, we invite students to explore the possibilities that urban designers -and researchers- possess to generate positive changes in contexts of scarcity. The studio will depart from the contemporary Indian context as stage for experimentation, surfacing the idea of infrastructure not necessarily as a more-than-human (one-time) solution, but a transitional set of strategies that would allow for the re-imagination of Indian urbanity. Frugal tactics of space, manifested through small-scaled urban devices that can plug into existing infrastructural systems: transportable and dismountable objects, capable of accommodating diverse productive activities. We term them ‘Light Infrastructures’. The structure of the studio will fluctuate between lectures and discussions on the theories of infrastructure and design activism, to practical developments of infrastructures. A design-research inquest, materialized in the form of implementation manuals (containing working drawings, operational models, on-ground strategies, market research, step-by-step construction processes, and its impact on the urban context).