Tools to understand people and places

Tools to understand people and places

This workshop was conducted as part of the new elective subject, ‘Places in Cities’, developed and offered in the Department of Urban Design as part of the project activity and in collaboration with Dr. Christiane Brosius and Dr. Cathrine Bublatzky from Heidelberg University. The workshop focussed on tools to study and understand urban placemaking through walking and mapping. Participants were introduced to the concepts that have been important in urban studies related to walking such as flaneurie, loitering, mobilities, spatialities of walking (sidewalks, roads, and streets), rhythm analysis and the urban sensorium. Students from the programs of Urban Design in SPA Delhi and Transcultural Studies, as well as Anthropology in Heidelberg University, exchanged learnings of methods and processes related to walking, mapping and community-based fieldwork. Discussions revolved around case studies of students’ projects on cities of both contexts, India and Germany.