र.
(← selected work) (research question)

what are the invisible boundaries inside a village, and where do they overlap?

Co-design to revive and strengthen collective spatial associations.

(role)
embedded fieldwork · participatory systems mapping
(period)
2019 — 2020
(context)
ambli · ahmedabad · 14 communities
(status)
excellence award

A village of 40,000 square metres and fourteen communities, running on a boundary system no map recorded — caste, religion, age, mobility, wealth. This work instrumented that system by asking the residents least able to conceal it, and designed into the pockets where the boundaries overlapped.

Urban villages inside Indian cities do not decay from neglect. They decay from dissociation — the city grows around them, long-time residents leave, and what remains is fabric no one is attached to any more. Ambli, on Ahmedabad's western periphery, was midway through that process.

The system nobody had mapped

The village ran on boundaries that appeared on no plan: caste, religion, age, mobility, wealth. Fourteen communities inside forty thousand square metres, each with its own territory, its own thresholds, its own degrees of permeability. The boundaries were real enough to govern where a person could walk, and invisible enough that the village could not discuss them.

The jury put it more precisely than I could at the time:

Raghav has identified and mapped the invisible and virtual boundaries and thresholds that exist in our communities — boundaries which define specific areas, and have varying degrees of discernability. Through the resultant mesh, he identified pockets of potentiality and greater commonality.

Children as instrument

The measurement problem was the whole problem: how do you survey a boundary system that its own inhabitants will not name? I went to the people with the least incentive to conceal it, and the largest stake in the outcome — the children, who hold the decision that actually determines the village's future: stay, or leave.

A transect walk, and a simple ask: draw the places you like. What came back was a dataset — roughly two hundred drawings of a particular ambli tree, a chabutra, a temple gate, a festival ground, a lane where a game happens. Assembled and categorised, the drawings became a map of attachment. Overlaid against the community boundaries, they revealed the thing I was looking for: the few sites claimed by more than one group.

Designing into the overlap

Those pockets got the interventions. Non-programmatic play structures, tuned to their immediate context and carrying micro-climate functions — greenhouses, water harvesting, study areas, meditation space, small farms, hydroponics. The structures were deliberately unprogrammed: they create the occasion for different communities to occupy the same ground without prescribing what happens there.

Identity was never the thing to design. The associations that produce it were.

Awarded the Student Excellence Award, CEPT University.

Ambli's evolution — the city arriving at the village edge.
fig.01
Ambli's evolution — the city arriving at the village edge.
Settlement growth and the fourteen community territories.
fig.02
Settlement growth and the fourteen community territories.
Months in the village — access before research.
fig.03
Months in the village — access before research.
The instrument — roughly two hundred drawings from a transect walk, assembled and categorised. A map of attachment the village had never seen of itself.
fig.04
The instrument — roughly two hundred drawings from a transect walk, assembled and categorised. A map of attachment the village had never seen of itself.
Strategy — attachments overlaid against community boundaries to locate the pockets of overlap.
fig.05
Strategy — attachments overlaid against community boundaries to locate the pockets of overlap.
Perception map — the boundary mesh, and its varying degrees of discernability.
fig.06
Perception map — the boundary mesh, and its varying degrees of discernability.
The village, whole — interventions sited only where the boundaries overlapped.
fig.07
The village, whole — interventions sited only where the boundaries overlapped.
Intervention — non-programmatic play structure.
fig.08
Intervention — non-programmatic play structure.
Intervention — micro-climate programme.
fig.09
Intervention — micro-climate programme.
Intervention — shared ground.
fig.10
Intervention — shared ground.
(method)
01
embed
months inside the settlement before proposing anything about it — mostly with children: playing, listening, helping with homework. access came before research.
02
instrument
a transect walk where children drew the places they were attached to. ~200 drawings, categorised and assembled into a map of association the village had never seen of itself.
03
locate
overlaying those attachments against the community boundaries to find the pockets of commonality — the few sites claimed by more than one group.
04
co-design
back with lego blocks, letting children build in the sites their own drawings had identified. the structures came from them; the climate programming came from me.
(next) koliwadas — embedded participatory method →