What Makes India Urban? Challenges Towards Mobility, Infrastructure, Energy, and Perpetual Change

Investigated in the first section under the title “Screened and Narrated Urbanism” will be links between urbanization and cultural shift. Audiovisual installations will generate images, sounds and voices relating to various urban situations, for example to Gurgaon, the special economic zone set directly at the threshold of New Delhi. By means of more then 50 different projects, the visitors to the exhibition will be offered views into a variety of inhabited environments – from Indian streets to new highways, from emerging satellite cities to impressive skylines – and hence a sense of the unique spaces and locations offered by urban India. The first part of the exhibition guides visitors into the everyday world, the dimensions and cultural specifics of various Indian cities, while the second part, entitled “Demystified Urbanism,” focuses on efforts by architects and urban planners to reshape India's cities and to fashion appropriate methods for doing so. The challenge facing architects and planners is to recognize preexisting cultural inscriptions and to construct spaces based on these. The selected architectural and planning projects call attention to the infrastructural challenges currently confronting India's cities. The spectrum extends from the preservation of historic monuments all the way to large-scale projects, special enterprise zones, and new infrastructural initiatives. Finally, diverse textual material drawn from Indian and German publications and from contemporary Indian literature can be accessed on location at the exhibition. These textual extracts serve as correctives to the collective images stored in our memories, exposing clichés. These literary examples are often characterized by the turn back to the local tradition, to the microcosm of one's personal lifeworld, to stories about the city and about social milieus which may ultimately vanish in the wake of India's globalization and homogenization. Aravind Agida’s Booker Prize winning novel “The White Tiger,” for example, is set in the world of the call center, in the emerging satellite cities with their gigantic malls and gated communities, and their Indian solutions to traffic problems. The exhibition is curated by Anand Patel, Ahmedabad, and Ulla Giesler, Berlin. Our thanks goes to all participating architects, artists, and theoreticians for their tireless input and generous contributions, without which this exhibition project could not have been realized.