Neighbourhood Improvement Partnership ‘If we fix our neighbourhoods, we fix our city’
Visualization Guide An Invitation to Co-Create Visualizations that guide Imagineering change in Bengaluru Introduction ‘Neighbourhood Improvement Partnership’ has been conceived as a platform to enable, involve and support local citizens in tackling the complex urban issues alongside public official. The choice of scale of interjection as neighbourhood level, is strategic to enabling breaking down of large complex urban problems into smaller geographies, making them easier to comprehend and resolve. The underlying idea being that if we fix our neighbourhoods we fix our city. By bringing focus to the local scale the intention is to see urban challenges from a quality of life perspective. Since it is local communities that understand their neighbourhoods best, (and are most vested in them), NIP model offers a framework to directly bring citizens and local communities into role of problem solving. Thus, fostering the spirit of community building, demonstrating merit in working together, pooling resources and skills, and taking ownership of the places they live in. This is intended to strengthen democracy and accountability at the lowest level as citizens are the first mile in need identification and the last mile in delivery of sustainable solutions and sustained impact. Putting Community at the epicentre of change making, is also meant to embed and promote the idea of the ‘common’ encouraging the notion of collective identity and ‘shared’ spaces, resources, knowledge and values.
Piloting NIP Platform as a City Competition The first edition to ‘Neighbourhood Improvement Partnership’ is a city-wide competition with a total grant of 1 Crore. The key focus of the competition has been to address issues related to traffic, water and energy scarcity as well as concerns with regard to public safety, public space and the environment.
Tasks Ahead The competition has received 86 entries in all and after the shortlisting of 32 entries, the process of final selection is underway. After this the selected projects are expected to go into implementation. Inaddition to helping implement projects on ground, a key aim is to also document the process of change, in order share these learnings forward. This will involve recording the potential intended and impact of both, the overall NIP process at the city level as well as interjection of individual project at micro (neighbourhood) level. In this process, visualization is seen as a critical agency to not just capture moments and aspirations in time but create images that inspire and energize change. The total of 86 proposals can be seen as 2 sets - Projects that win funding and projects that don’t. For the later, the visualization exercise is an attempt to capture a proposal as a community‘s dream that can live on as people share it with others in the community, publish them in newspapers or the internet to bring awareness/attention to the idea/ issue or inspire people to realise it together. While for the former, that are awarded NIP funding, these images are a crucial interjection that record the transition between ‘before’ and ‘after’ in a given context.
Contact info: Kalpana Kar 9845077744 | Ankit Bhargava 07409060602 |
citizensforthecity.nip@gmail.com |
http://bit.ly/NIP_FB