EDITORIAL
As City Observer steps into its second year, all of us on the editorial team would like to begin by thanking you, our audience, for all the great feedback, support and enthusiasm that you have shared with us thus far. We’re thrilled with the response we’ve received to the first two issues of the journal and hope to keep up this momentum in the coming months! While individual issues of the City Observer are not thematic, there is an overarching theme for the journal itself, which is ‘Cities and People’. There is a reason for this seemingly generic approach. How each of us understands the phenomenon of the ‘City ‘is a reflection of our own experiences, training and our cultural bent of mind. Let’s call it perspective. Some of us approach urbanization as a set of problems to solve. Or maybe we are captivated by the potential of the future, given how fast many cities are changing. Some others tend to see the city primarily as the space of opportunity in the ‘sharing economy’ of the 21st century. For some, cities are a measure of speed and time, representing the fast pace of life, while others might regard them as a celebration of culture, diversity and so on. There are also those for whom the city is in many ways just a backdrop for their personal stories and daily lives. All of these are valid conceptions and reactions to the city and for many of us an understanding of the ‘City’ is more than just one thing at any point in time. For most of us, the experience of each city tends to be unique and grounded in its own truths. Despite these numerous nuances – and often because of them – in our contemporary methods of operating in the city, we have begun to classify the discussions on them into a few defined and tangible threads for convenience of discourse. ‘Smart’ cities, ‘Resilient’ cities, ‘Sustainable’ cities, ‘Informal’ cities and so on are a few of such themes associated with the conversation on cities today. These terms are definitely useful as frameworks to describe, analyse, promote and often even design cities. However, it is important to keep in mind that they are all lenses or tools that should ultimately refer to the complexity of relationships between individuals, societies and the places they inhabit. When they become removed from this fundamentally human aspect of cities, these
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CITY OBSERVER | June 2016
themes serve as little more than simplifications, and fail to address the richness and essence of urban life. Unfortunately, a similar kind of segmented thinking is already seen, often to harmful effect, in the way many cities are developed and managed – with silos created for various functions and departments which are then responsible for their piece of the city alone, regardless of the numerous associations that each has with society at large. The city, however, is not a machine and to prevent oversimplification in our understanding, we should resist the temptation to treat it as one. Instead, we need to find ways to accommodate and reflect on the multitude of perspectives that have the potential to give us a richer snapshot of the urban condition. While we may still have a long way to go in terms of changing the way we operate in the urban fabric, attempting to consciously address this complexity in the conversation on cities is, we believe, an important place to start. And so while we encourage writing and reading about the city through an array of lenses in each issue, focusing on ‘Cities and People’ is our way of inviting both, our authors and our audience, to consciously consider the articles in a narrative about how people relate to cities and vice versa. In this issue, as in the past, the response to our prompt has been diverse and well-articulated, with a wide variety of topics and cities. We hope you find much to intrigue and interest you. Thank you once again for sharing this journey with us, and happy reading! Shruti Shankar On behalf of the Editorial Team