Johannesburg is full of artistic communities especially associated with audio-visual production and digital media. Hubs of small groups meet in coffee houses or temporary meeting points, but they don’t have a chance to organize themselves for medium- or long-term collaborations. To bring these topics to the streets and communicate their needs, A Maze. Interact created a scenario for these people. It has the potential to develop into a hotspot of digital culture in the future. The festival aimed to raise questions at the crossroads of development aid and artistic entrepreneurship.

On the way from the airport, the first impression of Johannesburg is that of fractured and detached districts and areas connected by massive highways. The streets seem vast and lifeless; they exude a feeling of emptiness. Passengers hide in their cars—the only places they feel safe. The spirit awoken during the 2010 football World Cup is still visible in the infrastructure: Now in the form of hardly used stadiums, abandoned access roads, and rarely frequented new bus lines.

The festival’s center, The Grove, a building complex in the central Braamfontein district, presents a stark contrast to the surrounding flagship stores, buildings decorated with media façades, coffee shops and restaurants. In the middle of this gentrified spot it is a beautiful theater that hosts and displays a conference, an exhibition, workshops, screenings, and concerts.

A MAZE. Interact Festival, Concert Night with live act Dokta SpiZEE from Johannesburg.

© Kutlwano Moagi/Lerato Maduna

The goal of the A Maze. Interact festival is to inject impulses into an emerging cultural media network between Africa and Europe. The festival’s catalog states that it is about the creation of a sustainable platform for interdisciplinary expertise, such as media art, game theory and design, modding culture, DIY games, cultural and postcolonial studies, and fosters a playful yet serious exchange. That just sounds too easy.

Game art uses the method of the “magic circle” that was coined by a Dutch cultural theorist, Johan Huizinga, in 1938. He is known for his groundbreaking book on the playful human, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Huizinga popularized the theory of play and ritual being closely connected. Certain playful rituals, or behaviors, are required to provide fluid and immersive interactions for the participants. These are the prerequisites for cultural development.

Take, for example, Flipside, a game project by the Berlin-based site-specific game collective Invisible Playground and performance artist Anthea Moys. The setting consists of small teams who have to run through the streets. They get dramaturgical instructions and have to unravel challenges. Based on the simple green-box system used in movie production the players carry a green-painted panel on which video sequences from Berlin are keyed in. The different teams have to cast pedestrians and re-enact the scenes from Berlin in front of the panel. In this way they create small film clips.

The street game Flipside connects the Johannesburg players with Berlin using a "Teleportation Ritual."

© Kutlwano Moagi/Lerato Maduna

With the street game Flipside the players walk around carrying a mobile green screen as sort of a game board. They fulfill tasks in front of the screen on which sequences from Berlin are keyed in.

© Kutlwano Moagi/Lerato Maduna

This seems rather complex. However it becomes a funny quest and a joyful communication setting for the players. They encounter unforeseen situations and open up for new interaction possibilities. This generates an emotional connection.

This game played in public space involves more than just the players—it intervenes in the public space, affecting walkers and shopkeepers. It interrupts the day-to-day interactions of pedestrians, who are not prepared for such gamification, a recent trend that describestheinjection of playful approaches to daily life.

The idea behind this game is that it is played both in Johannesburg and in Berlin, in order to investigate possible connections and/or misconnections between the two cities. Although Flipside might need technical improvement, it proves that its experience design, which is embedded in urban gaming, carries potential for social connectedness.

In a different way, the conference and discussion panels at the festival showed how playfulness and complex issues can be knitted together. Diverse topics dealt with the notion of space and how its parameters are transformed through location-based mobile services and augmented reality technologies. Although it is easy for the inhabitants of Johannesburg to get access to technology nowadays, how could they get access to peer groups and communities? The panel discussions between international speakers and an interested, talkative South African audience were dominated by suggestions and opportunities for possible collaborations.

Another issue that was raised several times was that the city as a temporary playground for cultural development has to take into account the specific local conditions and frameworks which have historically grown within the city. This leaves the discussion quickly at a dead end if the participants lack an understanding of the local conditions and historical facts. Dealing with the fact that interaction does not necessarily need a common ground—but common goals—the playful approach extends to the self-organization of individuals and groups: co-creation hubs such as shared offices, servers and meeting points are locally emerging for game developers, music journalists and artists in South Africa. However they can only operate on a backend infrastructure, with funding, or business options. This kind of trial-and-error set of interactions can open up intercultural communication. It is set in an experimental playground that investigates a possible future state of co-development and knowledge exchange. A Maze. Interact took a small step in this direction.

A MAZE. Jump'n' Run Party at Alexander Theatre with Game Boy live act Meneo from Barcelona.

© Kutlwano Moagi/Lerato Maduna

Guests at A MAZE. Jump'n' Run Party at Alexander Theatre. 

© Kutlwano Moagi/Lerato Maduna

Mumbai rootstock

Over the last decade Mumbai has undergone a radical process of economic change. The large manufacturing industries, which until the 1980s constituted the base of the metropolis’s production system, have given way to new business and manufacturing entities. Mostly small in size, these enterprises have rapidly spread throughout the urban fabric. These various agents of change have adapted to the city’s giant discontinuous structure, connecting to one another and acting like a rhizome. The transformations occurring in Mumbai, similar to those observed in other major industrial cities across India, from Calcutta to Ahmedabad, provide the context for the work of CRIT, an Indian research group that offers a plural and collective picture, just like the phenomena they observe.

Pleasantly disordered

Grafting itself onto an urban and social landscape whose layers have been built up over the course of generations, Mumbai’s new economic system has generated unusual forms of work, life and movement. Crowded trains and traffic jams have appeared in unexpected places at unusual times, bedrooms have been turned into offices and shanty towns into company networks for branded goods; teachers have become insurance brokers and architects property developers, and so on. Similar changes have affected the morphology of the city: the skeletons of old disused factories have rapidly given way to shopping centers and retail outlets, lagoon areas have become housing developments, old neighborhoods have been replaced by tower blocks of apartments, and large dumping grounds have assumed the guise of outsourcing complexes for foreign businesses. Mumbai has absorbed these new models with difficulty but with considerable generosity, generating a “pleasantly disordered” urban system, an undefined, mutating, rarefied city whose pattern is continually erased and at the same time rewritten by the myriad of players who inhabit it.

High-intensity cities

In Mumbai, the growth and fragmentation of economic activities has given rise to a more intense pace of life and work, linked more to the nature of new practices than an actual increase in the number of people working. The transformation, for example, of a traditional mill for weaving cotton into a business services center with the same number of staff can spark a giant increase in the amount of information exchanged, procedures and controls carried out, as well as the number of people and vehicles coming and going. The authorities have often responded to the system’s changing speed by planning large-scale transport infrastructures. Motorways, bridges and flyovers have thus been quickly overlaid onto landscapes made up of old residential neighborhoods, markets, disused factories and forests. This process has frequently involved forcing large numbers of people to relocate, pushing up the price of land and buildings and increasing land consumption. In turn, each project has generated further demand for new infrastructures, setting off a cyclical process that has turned Mumbai into a place of perpetual renewal.

The determinist paradox

Traditional practices and theories for analyzing and planning cities using deterministic methods and linear projections into the future are based on the assumption that the results are always articulated and predictable. Deriving from this approach, the numerous major “modernization” schemes have been realized using tools and processes that are insensitive to local specificities. In the name of factors such as “efficiency,” “capital” and “the greater common good,” countless requests and claims have been sacrificed, leading to a disavowal of age-old acquired rights. However, the effects induced by such interventions on a complex urban network where many aspects are intertwined—linguistic, physical, social, institutional and economic—have in many cases assumed completely unexpected forms and characteristics. In Mumbai, deterministic projects, programmes and policies have often acted in a completely different way to that which was planned, revealing a “second life” in contrast with the theoretical principles that generated them.

Taking your nose away from the screen

In contrast with the deterministic approach, the work ofis based on a subtler look at urban conditions, centered around understanding the complexity of claims and networks. Observing Mumbai, and the contemporary city in general in its hic et nunc, is like watching a film with your nose pressed up against the screen—all you can see is just a few pixels (a metaphor used by Salman Rushdie in his novel Midnight’s Children). Exponents of CRIT maintain that it is therefore necessary to take a diversified view and come up with processes of intervention with fluid edges that allow for the movement, transformation and osmosis of the various factors. It is a practice that needs to be tactical and fairly agile, where necessary, in order to bring about a radical change of direction.

This text is based on a conversation between Guido Musante and CRIT.

The article was first published in DOMUS, issue 959.

CRIT is a group of individuals interested in developing critical understandings of and responses to the rapidly changing urban realm, which the group perceives as having no boundaries and requiring fundamentally different—and multifaceted—methods of interrogation. CRIT's methods are multidisciplinary in approach, tactical in orientation, and steeped in a rigorous engagement with the everyday.

Projects and Awards

Since 2003, the collective, whose membership expands and contracts as needed, has been involved in research, pedagogy, and intervention on and in the urban realm. The group’s main areas of research are theorizing emerging urbanism, housing, urban peripheries, mapping and archiving, and development planning and design.

Sanitation in mass transit corridors, an ongoing project: public toilets in railway stations in Mumbai

© CRIT, Rupali Gupte

CRIT’s recent projects include Tactical City (2003), a written history of Mumbai as architectural fiction that conceptualizes the city as a function of innumerable tactical efforts of its inhabitants; Mumbai in the 90s: An Archive of Urban Interventions (2003), which mapped interventions in the city as part of the exhibition “Image City: Formal & Informal Networks, Images of Asia” at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen; Vision Plan for Mumbai’s Eastern Water Fronts (2005) that aimed at developing alternative scenarios and strategies for the city’s harbor-side shore, where port activity is in decline; Study of Housing Typologies in Mumbai (2007) a compilation of twenty-one housing types; Multifarious Nows (2008), an installation that critiqued conventional cartography and attempted to build an archive of the Mill lands of Mumbai; Slum Settlement Studies (2011), which aimed to understand the unique typological aspects of these settlements in Mumbai; design and development support for various slum communities to self-develop their housing and social infrastructures (ongoing); and Sanitation in Mass Transport Corridors–Public Toilets in Railway Stations (ongoing), which aims to improve sanitation facilities in the railway stations of Mumbai.

Architects

Rupali Gupte, a founding member of CRIT, is an architect and urban designer. She holds a B.Arch from the Kamla Raheja Vidyanidhi Institute for Architecture (KRVIA), University of Mumbai, and an M.Arch from Cornell University. She is an assistant professor at KRVIA, and she operates an architectural practice in collaboration with Rohan Shivkumar. She has written and presented papers on urbanism, infrastructure and housing around the world. Her urban development work includes contributions to the Redevelopment of Mill Lands of Mumbai; Redevelopment of the Eastern Water Fronts of Mumbai; Preparation of Comprehensive Plan for Greater Mendefera Region, Eritrea and Design of Housing and Public Spaces in Mumbai for various slum communities in Mumbai.

Prasad Shetty is an urbanist and has studied architecture at KRVIA and urban management at the Institute for Housing and Urban Development Studies, Erasmus University, in Rotterdam. A founding member of CRIT, he teaches at the Rachana Sansad’s Academy of Architecture in Mumbai and serves as secretary to the Mumbai Metropolitan Region–Heritage Conservation Society and Environment Improvement Society and an expert member to the Dadra–Nagar Haveli Planning & Development Authority. His work involves research, writing, and teaching on contemporary Indian urbanism, including architectural practices, studies of post-industrial landscapes, housing types, archiving post-liberalization developments, entrepreneurial practices, and urban property.

Aneerudha Paul, a founding member of CRIT, is an architect and urban designer. He completed his B.Arch from the Bengal Engineering College, University of Calcutta, and M.Arch from the School of Planning & Architecture, New Delhi. He is the director of KRVIA, a member of the Dadra-Nagar Haveli Planning & Development Authority, and general secretary for the Maharashtra Association of Schools of Architecture. His urban development projects include the Up-gradation of Perspective Plan for Haldia Planning Region; Self-Redevelopment of Slums in Mumbai; and Preparation of Heritage Guidelines for Vasai Virar Sub-Region.

Kausik Mukhopadhyay is an artist and a founding member of CRIT. He has a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Rabindra Bharati University, Calcutta, and a master’s degree in fine arts from Viswa Bharati University, Shantiniketan. He teaches at KRVIA. He has held artist residencies at Gasworks in London (2002) and Tamarind Arts in New York (2007). His work has been exhibited at Tate Modern in London (2001), National Gallery of Modern Art in Mumbai (2004), and the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth.

Rohan Shivkumar is an architect and urban designer. He holds a degree from L.S. Raheja College of Architecture, Mumbai, and a master’s degree in regional and international studies in architecture from the University of Maryland. He is the deputy director of KRVIA, and has an architectural practice in collaboration with Rupali Gupte. He has worked on studies concerning slum rehabilitation and open-space regulations with several groups concerned with development in Mumbai as well as the design of housing and public spaces for slum communities in the city. He is currently involved in Cinema City, an interdisciplinary project exploring the relationship between cinema and the city of Mumbai. He has written for Architecture + Design, Indian Architect & Builder, and Art India.

Local curators: Chitra Venkataramani with Prasad Khanolkar

Metropolitan Region: Mumbai, India

Since the 1990s, the economy of Mumbai has been changing. The large manufacturing industries that formed the foundation of the economy until the 1980s have given way to a mode of production that is based on fragmented enterprises, which occupy varied spaces across the city. Mumbai has become a city of entrepreneurial agents who facilitate the production of goods and services within these new and fragmented conditions. The financial sector has also been on the rise.

As this new economy plays out on the diverse geographies and complex histories of the city, it creates unusual patterns of working, living, and moving: Trains are crowded at unusual hours, bedrooms turn into offices, street food is branded and sold as health food, traffic jams occur at unexpected places, branded products are produced inside a slum, and school teachers are also insurance agents. The speed of the city has intensified in terms of both movement and transformation.

The morphology of the city is also changing: The cadavers of old industries are being replaced by malls, multiplexes, and commercial complexes, mudflats and mangroves are being developed into housing complexes, garbage-dump yards are being transformed into complexes for processing outsourced business from abroad, and old housing stock is being replaced by apartment towers. These transformations push the city to new levels of intensity, with an increased number of activities and transactions. This intensity creates stresses. Planning authorities often respond to such stresses with large-scale infrastructure projects. New corridors are cut through forests, industrial belts, informal settlements, old neighborhoods, and marketplaces. Wherever these corridors are established, they further transform the landscape: Large numbers of people are displaced, property prices rise, old neighborhoods are redeveloped, land-uses change, networks are disrupted and rebuilt, and a new city form emerges. The planners’ interventions further intensify conditions in the city, a situation that results in another cycle of large-scale infrastructure.

Bandra Skywalk, Mumbai 

© CRIT

In the past fifteen years, Mumbai has been subject to many cycles of transformations, responses, and further responses, making it into a site of perpetual renovation. The backdrop of cyclical change and rising expectations in Mumbai forms the context of CRIT’s project. It is our desire to rethink mobility beyond rapid-transport systems and moving masses of people. It is our desire to rethink the notion of speed. We would like to expand the idea of mobility beyond transportation, looking at aspects of access, migration, gentrification, class movement, and physical transformations of cities. Our contention is that urban spatial practices (of architecture and planning) obsessed with deterministic methods of analysis and grand generalized readings of the city are unable to deal with the logics driving Mumbai.

At the outset, we would like to propose a hypothesis that large-scale (spatial) interventions operate over a landscape of older claims producing yet another layer of claims, affect networks across the city in unexpected ways, and work out in a completely different manner than was planned, creating newer conditions and intensities. It is important to specifically examine the landscape of claims, networks, and the afterlife of planning interventions before envisioning future scenarios. Projected visions of the future have often oscillated between two singular ideas: high-tech utopias and post-apocalyptic ruins. However, such singular, linear projections of the future often disrupt the logic of the city, which is driven by messy, complex, contested, fragmented, absurd, and intense conditions. Much of our work is based on the critique of large-scale plans and megaprojects that represent such singular projections and visions.

We would like to articulate the idea of tactical intervention as an approach that emerges out of nuanced readings of city conditions and allows an engagement with the logic of the city without necessarily disrupting it. One of the tactical interventions would be to explore possibilities of developing devices that allow multiple imaginations of the future for a place, as opposed to having a singular vision formulated through deterministic processes. This could make the projection and envisioning exercise a more engaging one because each urban actor using the device could have his or her own reading and vision of the future, which, potentially, would allow them to formulate a strategy to implement that vision.

Null Bazaar, Mumbai

© CRIT