Reimagining public spaces through city literature of Delhi: mapping the history, present concerns and future transformations

Abstract

The ongoing debate surrounding public spaces revolves around several key issues: their historical existence, the meaning attributed to them, the varying expectations from different communities regarding how they perceive these spaces, the influence of material structures on the creation of the public sphere, and the contentious nature of the term ‘public,’ especially given the evidence of various forms of exclusion. Questions arising in this area highlight the compromises, conflicts, and contestations that characterise public space’s inherently ambiguous and fluid nature. Although there are various theories and histories (Arendt 1958; Lefevre 1991; Sennett 1992; Mitchell 1995, 2003) regarding public space and accessibility, our exploration revealed a significant gap in the thorough analysis and reimagining of public spaces within the Indian context. Consequently, this thesis analyses the transformation of public spaces through an architectural lens in urban literature and applies the literary urban studies (Daniel and Queiroz 2013; Gurr 2021; Jason 2022) framework in the analysis. Here, we are more focused on critiquing the aspects of growing privatisation efforts (Boycko 1996) and the top-down approach in urban planning, which displays the postcolonial urbanism (Kalyan 2017; Grubbauer 2019; Myers 2020) aspect of our thesis.