Rupali on the limitations of the current tools we have when it comes to understanding our cities...

“…often what happens is that we get our frameworks of thinking from certain ‘givens’. That is something that we have been arguing, that our ways of understanding cities come from these two disciplines - cartography and statistical ethnography - and what those two disciplines have given us is these two tools - the map and the statistic.…these two tools are limiting in the way they understand life. To give you an example, what a map would require is clear boundaries. So if boundaries are fuzzy, they are corroded, they (maps) would start making no sense. For statistics, you have to simplify things, you have to simplify data. So if things are complex, they will not make sense. The other thing that maps and statistics do is they don’t allow for experiential ways of thinking of space because you need to quantify, you need to simplify. And they also create certain moralities of space - what is standard? What is good? What is best practice? Or also clear separations between what is inside and outside, what is public and private….”

Rupali Gupte is an architect, urbanist and an artist based in Mumbai. She is one of the founder members of the School of Environment and Architecture and currently teaches there. She is a partner at the Bard Studio, Mumbai. She has also been one of the co-founders of the urban research network, CRIT. Rupali has studied architecture (B-Arch, Mumbai University) and urban design (M-Arch, Cornell University). She has earlier worked as: an Assistant Professor at the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture, Consulting Urban Designer to the Town Administration of Mendefera, Eritrea and Architect at the Kohn Pederson Fox Associates, New York. Her work include research on Indian urbanism with focus on architecture, urban culture, housing, urban form and tactical practices. It crosses disciplinary boundaries and take different forms – writings, drawings, mixed-media works, storytelling, teaching, walks and spatial intervention. This episode was recorded in Nov, 2021

Rupali's Studio -

https://bardstudio.in/

BARD Studio on Instagram -

https://www.instagram.com/bardstudiomumbai/

The school where Rupali is a founder member and teaches currently -

https://sea.edu.in/

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