“The street is a room of agreement.” 1 Kahn’s quip at his AIA Gold Medal acceptance speech holds as true today as it did in 1971.
The quintessential Indian street is methodical madness personified. Heisenberg’s (1927) ‘Atomic Uncertainty Principle’ largely extends, in hypothesis, to the moving elements of the streetscape – we cannot accurately predict, at any one given moment in time, its exact nature. The street itself is occupied and claimed by numerous other independent actors and self-made processes.2
Unlike the European street model with crystal cut demarcations for motorists, cyclists, pedestrians, HMVs, etc., the Indian street also accounts for variables that cannot be monitored so closely. Livestock, street performers, street vendors, rickshaws, automobiles, pedestrians, and the like, all exist in harmonious disarray, moving at mismatched paces. Their coordination is unpractised and indeterminate, yet unanimous and accommodating.
“….there is nothing simple about that order itself, or the bewildering number of components that go into it. Most of those components are specialized in one way or another. They unite in their joint effect upon the sidewalk, which is not specialized in the least. That is its strength.” 3
Herein lies the unspoken agreements of the spaces they intend to occupy to perform their individual process. In this context it’s important to recognise that rules need not be written, nor do they result from formal legal procedures (with respect to informal interactions and space usage).4 When you enter a street, you are inevitably a part of this agreement. Fractional decisions – to swerve, to avoid, to give way, or to participate, exist in the background, and the result of these instantaneous decisions, culminate in the foreground.
The entropy of this “room of agreement” can also be observed over a larger timeline. For instance, over the course of a year, the Indian street transforms from a place of congregation, to annual festival celebrations, mourning, religious processions, etc., on a cyclical timeline.
Man in any civilization, age old, has been either actively or passively contesting for space with his neighbor. Streets are not “public goods” but “rivalrous goods.” Everyone is competing for their own space. This has transformed the Indian street into spatial slices with multiple users at any given moment in time.
How do we account for these known unknowns? The very concept is a paradox! Do we consider these minute interactions on the drawing board when we plan our cities, structure our roads and build our private homes? Are you able to recognise the unspoken agreements that you are a part of?
– Written by Ankritya Diggavi, Research Fellow
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