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
Visualizations for community projects The aim for visualization of NIP Projects is to create images that capture the essence of each project’s intent, problematique, causality and benefits as one composite narrative that can guide the imagineering of change. They are imagined to be iconic so as to typify the solution they represent and become symbolic for the urban issue tackled. At the same time, the images need be relatable (Drawing from the everyday, the ‘Typical’ in ritual & space and embedding within the voices of desired stakeholders) so citizens are able to find themselves in it, relating to the problems and seeing themselves as the change makers. The visualizations are aimed to demonstrate the relation between need/problem felt in the city with effect on quality of life on a local everyday level as well as how micro level neighbourhood actions can aggregate to solve city level issues. Conceptually, these images can be perceived as being positioned in the transitionary space between a ‘before’ and an ‘after’ in a given context. We believe the images can play a pivotal role in inspiring the idea of NIP, as vehicles to share ideas of sectoral solutions - ‘good practices’, as well as become go-to images for targetted city issues framing diverse perspectives and visions.
Visualizations
BEFORE
Overlaying Process + Measurables of impact
Carrying transitional and transactional potential
AFTER
+ Raahgiri, Connaught Place, Delhi
+ Time Square, New York
overlaying intent, stakeholder voices, capturing the scale and space in focus, aspired future, measured impact/benefits etc....
Contact info: Kalpana Kar 9845077744 | Ankit Bhargava 07409060602 |
citizensforthecity.nip@gmail.com |
http://bit.ly/NIP_FB
Layers Capturing the Causality not the problem and Benefits not just the solution
To do this best, visualizations may not necessarily be an image of the problem (symptom) alone, but show causality of the same. Similarly, the potential may not be the image of the solution by itself but also the benefits that will follow – the desire (horizon) will be the driver of the change.
City-citizens dialogue
As in the projects, the visualization must also reflect a city-citizen dialogue. While in some cases local problems are an outcome of larger city scale issues, in others city level issues are a cumulation of smaller, everyday, local problems. In defining this dialogue lies the essence that drives NIP - how every action, no matter how small counts and how citizens can engage in tackling complex city issues. The application of the two lens may vary in proportion and expression depending on the significance of the sector as a issue and influence at local level on quality of life.
City Lens (Sectoral)
Led by Perception of problems Quantitative - City level metrics Indirect impact Representing a system
Connecting need at city level with effect on quality of life
Citizen Lens
Shaping a more sensory experience Qualitative - Affecting Quality of Life Direct impact Reflecting behaviour, space, use
A large part of the success of the dialogue will be in the framing of the images to determine ‘Eye of the beholder’, containing the protagonist and elements that evoke desired associations. In it, also highlighting behaviour trends, spaces in questions etc. One approach to how project contexts are framed may be in their relation with positions of habitation/ occupation/ experiences in the urban commons – pavement, road, lakes, public space etc.
Framing ‘Eye of the beholder’
Contact info: Kalpana Kar 9845077744 | Ankit Bhargava 07409060602 |
citizensforthecity.nip@gmail.com |
http://bit.ly/NIP_FB
Agency of Interjection
Next to the intent, benefits and dialogues is also imagined a place for the actor, representing the agency of interjection that are in spirit similar in all projects. The agency being the vehicle introducing the ideas/solutions, being the ‘common’ among the disparate intentions .... the one among many, the mascot for change...
‘Agency’ here evoking desire in citizens to see themselves as change makers ‘The Ghost’
‘Fix it Felix’
Building towards a Collective future
Further, it must be remembered that in NIP has a 2 tier strategy. The first is about aiding creation of projects in their context, while the other is curation of the same for impact and scaling up. Therefore the visions intended in these projects don’t exist in isolation. While individually they may be seen as representing snippets of future of a localized area, but put together they represent an idea of a ‘shared’ vision - A vision that NIPs endorse and leads. Demonstrating how smaller positions, intentions play their part in the larger narrative, is an important outcome of the visualization exercise.
Only 5% of vehicle share on roads is bicycles Take Back your streets!! Make room for bicycles!
Our Shared Future A vision of an inclusive, healthy, vibrant and sustainable future, a vision that promotes equality.
Each visual a snippet of a future
Capturing the Ethos, NIP as a community movement
It must be noted that the role of NIP is seen as not just adding infrastructure or change quality of life but also the intangibles such as creating community swell, empowering them to take ownership of their areas, to buy in into the potential of bringing change themselves. These intangibles too are imagined to be manifested in the visuals as the ethos of the civic movement.
Forms of media The visualizations are to be used in presentations, books, postcards, bill boards and websites as faces of the projects, therefore must be suitably made to fit the requirement of various forms. In addition, there may also be used in more interactive media such as in augmented reality applications to embed the narratives in-situ, hologram billboards/postcards etc. Contact info: Kalpana Kar 9845077744 | Ankit Bhargava 07409060602 |
citizensforthecity.nip@gmail.com |
http://bit.ly/NIP_FB