Visual cognition has long been recognised as a tool to mobilise place-making. However, it was through built architecture that such an impact was brought about historically. Centuries ago, cities were rather simple to navigate through, each with a unique culture for a local to identify their surroundings with. The easily discernible planning grid had the royal palace or the centre of worship at the heart of the city, with a bustling central market place alongside. Streets emanating from this centre organically branched out to nodes and smaller squares of residential units until the fortification walls that were built to mark territory and set guard rose till the heights of the sky. Such a compact, hierarchical sky-line of the town, dominated by domes of churches or a town-hall bell tower, constituted a characteristic visual code of urban space (Anna Januchta-Szostak, 2010) allowing the city to be visually and spatially intuitive to the city-dweller.
Expansion and densification of the city in the last two centuries, coupled with western influences that brought with it several architectural forms and functions and the development of suburbs, called for a chaos in the city. Buildings grew taller and cities grew wider, leaving the city-dweller feeling disoriented and unsafe. Innovation, too, soared during this Modernist era. It scrapped old-school styles of labour-intensive built fabrics to modular patterns of architectural forms, creating a mangled mess of what earlier constituted as the built culture of a city. Place-making emerged out of this transgression to the human code, placing the common man back to his role in the community and re-imagining public spaces to enhance the lives of the city-dwellers and to become vessels to carry positive communal meanings (Carr, Francis, Rivlin and Stone, 1993).
It is interesting to note that it was during the same time that artists’ across the world set off a revolution by bringing art out of its canvas and onto public streets, inviting the city to break out of the power-play that had long-established itself through socio-political structures. They demanded that art be accessible to all: that self-expression be at the heart of democracy and the city, its body. Visual art in the public realm, therefore, came to be as a by-product to this rise in the peoples’ voices. It became a reflection of how we see the world – the artist’s response to our time and place combined with our own sense of who we are (Bach, Penny B., 1992). Several names were accorded to this emerging practice- Graffiti, Street art and Public Art- and while such nomenclature distinguishes one’s political calibre from the other, the practice became an effective tool to add to the spatial character of a place and create a lasting imprint on the mental map of an individual (E. C. Tolman, 1940).
In the past few decades, this practice has earned a rather debatable reputation in many Western civilisations for its prompt show of rebellion. However, in a culture rampant with paan-stained and poster stickered-and-torn walls, the Indian community at large greeted the practice with curiosity and engaged enthusiastically to be part of the movement, enlisting the ethos and community participation that are the building blocks of place-making.
Several grassroots organisations all across the country have stepped up and out since then to reclaim public spaces and infrastructure. St+Art India, an eminent non-profit organisation founded by Hanif Kureshi, Arjun Bahl and Giulia Ambrogi in 2014, collaborates with renowned international and Indian artists to transform Indian cities with the medium of Public Art. They have also curated more than 50 murals in Lodhi District in New Delhi (which has now come be known as the Lodhi Art District) and ‘Conquer the Concrete’ in Chennai, engaging traditional and contemporary artists to dampen the visual impact of the growing concrete jungle within the bounds of the city. Cities such as Mumbai and Pune are extending this practice and rallying Street Art events to garner local talent in order to redefine the identity of their precincts, and many cities are following suit.
Celebrated Indian artists such as Daku (famous for following the footprints of the global phenomenon Banksy), Anpu Arkey and Shilo Shiv Suleman, to name a few, are also independently bringing forth pressing social, political and cultural notions, with a standard of craftsmanship comparable to high-art in their work. Art Collectives, such as The Aravani Collective and Dharavi Biennale, are spearheading social movements by employing collaborative public art as a means to raise awareness about the communities at issue. Public Visual Art, in essence, has emerged in India as a slow-brewing practice of adding human spirit to the ever-changing built and cultural tapestry of the Urban city.
In treating the urban cityscape as a canvas and respecting the spatial and cultural values it inhabits, Public Visual Art thus garners a reach far beyond what meets the eye. It enables the common man to take space in public places and claims their role in the story of the city. Thereafter, it forms a navigational imprint on anyone who chances upon this story. Its scale lends to a collective identity that evolves with the many temporal shades of the surroundings until eventually, it becomes an undeniable part of the city’s fabric and the life of the city-dweller.