IN A CITY, PARTS DO NOT MAKE A WHOLE 

This is a course on urbanism and storytelling. In this course, cities will be discussed as composites of

small forces of energetic selves, friendships and compassions. The energetic self here is the dimension of

the self that drives one to undertake specific activities connected to one’s desires. These could include

collecting strange objects, behaving like spies, writing stories, achieving mundane targets, opposing new

ideas, making antennae to listen to strange sound waves, counting every tree, tracking obscure data, etc.

Everyone seems to have a trip driven by the energetic self that one lives with and for. Trips seem to

provide individuals with their energy. Such energies, expressed in absurd quests, unusual obsessions and

bizarre interests cumulatively appear to be producing the city. The city seems to acquire its generative

energy from such small forces. In many ways the city seems to be a mad house and madness seems to be

running it. Small forces also express themselves in everyday friendships and compassions. These

practices go beyond the acts of routine and are considered unproductive in generating grand

conceptualizations of cities, often discarded as stray individual preoccupations, anecdotes or subjective

obsessions. While some of these are related to earning and occupations, others are simply ‘useless’.

Urban theory and pedagogy has seldom engaged with an understanding of these small forces or

extended it for speculative / projective purposes. This course aims at exploring small forces through a

framework of storytelling for understanding the mechanics of cities and speculating their future

trajectories. The stories will be semi-fictional narratives of small forces. Here, fiction is used as it has an

unburdening nature – it can become reflective and exploratory without having to explain / defend itself.

It has possibilities of lending itself to all fields of knowledge, but without getting hijacked and becoming

a reportage. Moreover, it is enjoyable to produce and consume it as well. Fiction allows one to draw

patterns through montaging fragments of different micro narratives. Unlike cartographies, storytelling

indulges itself into subjective and experiential realms; and unlike ethnographies, it remains

non-voyeuristic. It is able to engage with the city in a complex and agile manner, where the city does not

become an object, but an extension of the self and its experience.

The course is also interested in articulating the experience of emerging urbanity. It will engage in

sketching the contours of this urbanity using small forces as the material.

During the course, participants will develop short semi-fictional narratives (short stories) based on small

forces. These narratives may be of crime and immoralities (from organised crime to petty ones, from

psychopaths to fraudsters, from sedition to heists, from social crimes to economic ones). In many ways,

crime tests the edge of a society – its limits of infrastructure, of morality, of institutions, of practices, of

values, etc. It becomes a threshold for the next era to emerge. It also opens up the innards of the urban,

along with its deep desires. An investment into the mechanics of these crimes will point at the emerging

urbanity. Here crime becomes a route to understand the emerging urban condition.

For the participants it will be an opportunity to know cities and write stories. The four-week course will

include watching films, reading notes, diaries, stories and poems, and aimlessly chatting with each other.

The four weeks shall include identification & documenting a small force; developing reflective and

projective dimensions of the small force connecting it to emerging urban conditions; understanding the

speciality of the emerging urban conditions; and developing short stories on the city.