Articulating an opinion on these words is slippery. Separately, they have meanings in the deconstruction of places of different make-up.

Decolonization : seems all set for a past that is as treacherous as it is mythical now; it is an attempted surgery of an Alzheimer’s, extremely charged (almost brutal) in its attempts, but acted upon the blurred elements of our normalcy - from our aspirational language all the way to our very modes of working.

Decarbonization : seems all set for a future that seems as slanted as it is trendy now; it reads like a prescription by the disease for the diseased, extremely creative in projecting solutions within the tolerated ways of thinking. Whether it’s redrawing forests and rivers as entities for “protection” or tech-savvy resource management by rationing the legality of beings.

Although when spoken together it invokes hope - even if it is at the sight of some remembered decency in the hypocrite play of these words - for the future.

In the experience of cities, one cannot fail but notice varying degrees of hurriedness- ‘the constant need to move & work at an eager speed, under various work & live conditions.”.The project locates itself inbetween the conflict of the hurried bodies' tendency to find spaces for respite and the inability of the city infrastructure to lend itself to this tendency- attempting to reconcile the notion of “city as a machine” with that of “city as a home".The interventions are seen as retarding devices extending from existing infrastructure to create opportunities for pause. Trying to rethink urban-design process through the analogy of chess- challenging monumental intervention through informed moves, with a lot of wait and watch involved in the execution, and uncertainty factored in the design conception.

The act of planning, of short-sighted “development”, of the complete hijack by economical and legal language, are all acts of flattening. Flattening every nuance of how lives operate in the highly charged cities of our subcontinent. A culmination of such acts was the resettlement project of Mumbai Urban Transport Project, aimed “to make the life of Mumbaikars more convenient and efficient” as stated by the world bank. People were resettled from all over the city, to its outskirts. Some besides the city’s (read Asia’s) biggest garbage dump, resettled within 72, seven storey buildings spaced 3m apart, reaching a density of 5000 individuals per hectare, a feat possible solely after discarding all building regulations..20 years since construction, people have found their ways to settle and to make life possible. To assist in this process, even before proposing to add, a lot needs to be subtracted (if not the complete reconstruction). Only then smaller interventions can be installed, as simple-first moves, as provocations of play, social gatherings and community interactions.

As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?

As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?

As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?

As a landscape that has become speculative and an object of greed, it is often difficult to remind oneself that the city of Mumbai rests on a ground shaped by the actions of water over millennia. Not long ago, was when human alteration rose, first the gaothans were superimposed by the engineered infrastructures of the British, then post-independence development led an even more increase in the appropriation of land for purposes beyond local communities . Film City, Mahindra Factory and Charkop Industrial Area began to take root, impinging upon the rivers. Simultaneously the floodplains allowed for para-legal forms of occupation - the densest populations within the city are found here.Flooding in each Monsoon has led to increasing socio-economic aggravation for the urban poor, pronounced by administrative measures that favour gated communities, segregated planning and the automobile. In this context we asked the question of what would it mean to re-envision a relationship with the river?

"Cities have been seen as generators of employment, economy, goods, and aspirations. But at the same time, cities allow for the creation of multiple kinds of urban living, and these are reflected in the form of the city. The everyday lives of people in cities depend on several external factors (work, leisure, services, etc.), and the aspiration of the people always remains to function in sync with all of them. The importance given to these external factors generates the urgency to act, producing hurriedness in the process.

People in cities experience hurriedness—the constant need to move and work at an eager speed—under the influence of various working and living conditions. Different places experience different levels of hurriedness in the city.

This hurriedness is blatantly noticeable in metro cities at several instances. Whether it's a small purchase made at a street vendor in complete haste, often using simple monosyllabic communication, or an automobile driver always attempting to "make the next light." A quick cup of coffee or cutting chai is gulped, and people have breakfast standing on the road at a fast footstall before reporting to work. At the station, one dashes in haste to get aboard a local train, which will be followed in five minutes by another. In these, as well as several other subtler processes of hurriedness, the city or the immediate environment is experienced in a very different way compared to strolling through the same place.

These experiences of hurriedness become evident and noticeable when a person moves, either from one city to another or within a city. For example, when a person living in a metropolitan city visits a second-tier city, it is common to hear them exclaim how the ambiance of the place felt extremely laid back. This general statement made often about cities being slower or faster is essentially saying that the experiential time of the people in either of these cities expands or compresses beyond what the people are used to in their everyday lives. This expansion/ compression changes the experience, and hence the image of the place.

The image of a place is crucial to the way people develop associations with it. For example, people in metro cities nearing the age of retirement often express a longing to move to a particular town or second-tier city. One of the reasons is that these places have less hurriedness, and there's a belief that it will allow for a peaceful and stress-free life. This notion of relating the absence of hurriedness in a place to the quality of life is not limited to a specific age group, but even the idea of a vacation for a metro city dweller usually involves escaping from the city to a less hurried life, even if it is for a small period of time. These examples from within the city show how experiences of hurriedness in the city may also have implications for the city itself.

Hurriedness might also have a spatial character that it generates. When we talk about space for an individual, it can be generated through three means:

- the experience of the form and its characteristics (the idea of the container),

- the people around him/her and their activities, social position, character, etc. (the social space),

- and the space created by his/her own state of mind and body (the space of the self).

Hurriedness is the experience generated by a place on an individual. This hurriedness of the self-and/or social hurriedness both change the space the individual. The change is more in the sense of space (perception), which may then cause a change in the physical form, or the way spaces are appropriated.

This relation of hurriedness of a city and the space that creates it or the space that gets created seems to be an interesting enquiry, which could enable one to generate a new lens for evaluating spaces in cities and their relationship with people."

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