16: Ephemeral Urbanism with Rahul Mehrotra

““What societies invest in us [as architects] is to imagine better spatial possibilities in which lives can be lived!””

Timestamp Outline

1:24 Ephemeral Urbanism, the Kinetic City and Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral MEGACITY
2:13 On the illusion of the static city
3:47 Kumbh Mela
4:50 Book: Everyday Urbanism by Margaret Crawford
5:39 “The ephemeral is that aspect of the city that is temporary in nature...not only with the presence of other human beings, but also with shifting meaning. And then it recedes, it fades, it leaves no trace. It’s an enacted process.”
8:02 All architecture is ephemeral? Walter Benjamin on civilizations and ruin
10:21 India: 60% urban population for 6 months, 40% urban for the other 6 months
11:04 Landscape architecture and the ephemeral
13:05 JB Jackson, Gilles Clément and the Third Landscape, City Beautiful
14:38 The traveling circus disrupts the strict static city! Fantasy played out in a tent!
15:44 Farmers’ market as a rhythm and productive disruption
18:00 Time and architects and urban designers
20:44 A compostable architecture?
24:49 Conservation vs compostability
29:16 Kaleidoscopic identities
33:24 India and a pluralism of cultures
34:04 “India has a monopoly on all the problems”
35:44 “Absolute solutions”: China, the Mao period, the Singapore-model
36:49 “Sometimes when you have to reach your goal, the transitions take you in completely different directions. It’s not a clear linear path.”
37:41 Urban conservation work in Mumbai
42:24 Modernist history: Nehruvian legacy? Preservation and Chandigarh?
43:20 “The closer we are to the past, the harder it is to articulate a position about it.”
45:22 “What societies invest in us [as architects] is to imagine better spatial possibilities in which lives can be lived!”