COMMUNITY ENGAGEMENT
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Safe access provides a way forward for transparency in the design of station areas in Indian cities, contributing at the same time to improving the overall urban experience in these cities.
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for pedestrians, universal access or even motorized vehicles; private entities look for opportunities for making profit and government entities have to find solutions that balance the needs and aspirations of all stakeholders while keeping in mind the resources available. The participants then apply these new-found solutions for designing safe access to a real station area that they use in everyday life. So far, the workshop has been conducted in 3 cities- Delhi, Bangalore and Kochi, with the latter two cities using the workshop to inform decisions on actual sites- Yeshwanthpur station in Bangalore and Kaloor station and Lissie station in Kochi. In terms of outcomes, the participants not only understand and grasp the tools quickly but they are also able to apply this knowledge to a given site and choose strategies that are relevant. This is to say the very least a huge leap forward. The Interactive workshop was originally developed to disseminate the learnings from the Safe Access Manual to stakeholders in a quick and concise manner. It aimed to enable participants to quickly understand the tools for implementing safe access based on the 5 principles listed above, and apply it to a real station area that they pass through for everyday commute. The interactive workshop is conducted in 2 parts, the first of which is about understanding the principles of safe access and selecting relevant solutions. The second part is about applying this knowledge to a real site and working with other participants to prioritize solutions for those selected areas. The interactive workshop is designed for a maximum of 30–35 participants. The participants are divided into 5 groups of 6–7 people. Each group gets one game board and as many role play cards as the number of participants. The first part of the exercise focuses on understanding the principles of safe
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CITY OBSERVER | June 2016
access by collaborative role play. The role play cards establish the nature of the roles and the arguments that each participant has to put forward. Only one government and one private entity feature in each group. The other cards accommodate different citizen user groups such as a woman using a wheelchair, a car-owner, a grandfather, a teenager with a cycle and so on. The first iteration of the SAM interactive workshop was conducted in April 2015 at ConnectKaro2015, the WRI Annual conference in New Delhi. The primary focus here was to disseminate the knowledge of the SAM and therefore the workshop concentrated on helping the participants understand the tools that are available for designing station areas. The learnings from the first iteration of the workshop were that the game board is successful in simulating an environment of complex layering where the diverse aspirations and needs of stakeholders are negotiated and collaborations are formed to reach a consensus on solutions for a station area. The second iteration of the SAM interactive workshop was held in June 2015 as a master class in urbanism at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bangalore. The focus here was understanding the principles of SAM and extended to applying it to a real site. The site chosen was that of Yeshwanthpur railway station in Bangalore. This is a particularly interesting area as the railway station sits abutting a metro station and a highway on the same side with an urban village and a street leading to a bus station within 500 metres on the other side. The chosen site functions as a secondary transit hub for the city of Bangalore owing to the many modes of transit in close proximity to each other. The highway opposite the railway station has developed into an informal stopover point for private buses running to the northern and western regions of Karnataka