WELCOME TO ZILHAPUR!
Walking through the Indian Urban System

URBZ Mashup Workshop
@ Unbox Festival New Delhi, Feb 7th – 10th, 2013

The Concept: Urbanization in India is taking unpredictable turns. The growth of big cities is slowing down. Small towns are developing attitude along with deep interdependent networks into rural hinterlands. Villages themselves are increasingly going non-agricultural, while farming activities are struggling to adapt to new threats and challenges from all quarters.  Urban practitioners are finding themselves at odds while responding to these changes, since most global takes on urbanisation are still stuck in narratives of mega cities and one way rural urban migration – even when the reality in India remains more complex.

What: Participants will produce a detailed map of Zilhapur, an imaginary urban system in central India connecting all kinds of settlements and habitats. In Zilhapur the boundaries between rural and urban, nature and culture, tradition and technology, formal and informal are blurred. The Zilhapur map is a creative celebration of India’s mashed up urbanism where different forms of spatial organization and temporal orders seems to converge and overlap in ways that have not yet been clearly identified. This workshop uses creativity to make sense of emergent and misunderstood urban formations in India.

Expected outputs: 1) A collectively produced collage showing various sites, urban typologies and habitats connected together by communication, transportation, trading and institutional networks. 2) A Zilhapur manifesto (in book form) derived from the system’s organizational principles.

An introduction to the concept of the Urban System is available on airoots.