The metageographical imaginations of contemporary urbanization have evolved from the late 19th century visionary idealism that was embedded in the city-country dualism to the early 21st century challenges of an impending global urban transition. Early 20th century (hypo)theses on ways of social life set in a spatial rural-urban continuum gave way to the late 20th century propositions focusing on the concentration of technological, creative and productive energies of transnational economic networks in certain urban nodes. While contrasting imaginations of the contemporary urban condition have visualized either a tapestry of extended urbanization along global transportation corridors or variegated zones of total urbanization of the planet, Southern epistemologies have been unpacking the disjunctions between modernity and local citizenship practices to push back narratives of urban crises and infrastructural breakdown. Beneath these conceptual foundations lie ways of seeing that imagine urban space as either dualistic or in transition, concentrated or networked, extended or planetary, and in continuum or disjunct. How could inventive methodologies help articulate a creative spatial engagement with the tensions arising from some of the irresolvable contradictions between these lenses? And, how does the urban appear when recalibrated through agencies and practices that operate in these contradictions?

Orthographic drawings have widely shaped the manner in which space and form has been imagined in design thinking over the last three centuries. Architectural imaginations of surfaces and objects, mapped via numerical coordinates of parallel lines on planes, are produced to fill up space as an empty container through ideas embedded in efficient organization, anthropometric and ergonomic standards, and devoid of any other relations. Drawings entrapped in orthographic projections thus come to exile the many measures of our senses, practices of everyday life, and even the accrual of myths, memories, histories and fictions that shape experiences and perceptions of the form of space. In privileging the many measures of space that are hitherto exiled from the imagination, how could an expanded language of drawing and image-making transgress, blur or dissolve the dualism between builtform and life, and re-politicize the contemporary endeavor of the visual?

How could thinking of, as well as thinking with, the imagination of the forest in the city allow us to learn to live in increasingly wet, climate changed cities? This question is framed amidst the dire warnings of turbulent weathers and rising seas whose responses gather the form and force of large-scale infrastructural assemblages to futureproof cities by draining monsoonal flows or those that seek habitation elsewhere. Such interventions, predicated on containing water and making land dry, usually end up making cities more vulnerable to “natural” disasters. Contrary to their imagination as Other to the city, multiple kinds of forests including grasslands, wetlands and mangroves are posed as infrastructures; ones that hold monsoonal wetness and as learning environments for temporal negotiations of a multispecies habitation.

Algorithmic intelligence is designed to take self-governing decisions when set in a continuous data feed. Increasingly, we find its manifestations in media, politics, markets, infrastructures, lifestyles and cultures curating different worlds for different individuals. Its manifestations in architecture take the form of iterative codes to explore builtform types, materials and experiences that largely fit into or improvise an assembly line of industrial production. The precarity of this seemingly totalizing system, whose power and promise lies in centralizing data aggregation, emerges in the form of syntactical errors and glitches in the design process. How can such errors and glitches in algorithmic intelligence be designed and appropriated as forests of syntactic knowledge that afford spatial and material possibilities beyond the default industrial assembly line imagination for the production of builtform?

What does spatial thinking from South Asia rather than thinking of South Asia allow? The latter has contributed to an obsession with identity on the one hand and a belated modernity that has always had some catching up to do, on the other. Instead, the thinking from, allows new methodological openings for thinking space ecologically; as deep entanglements of relationships, spatial continuums, temporalities, claims, the spatialisation of memory, all contributing to questions of spatial justice that work with ideas beyond those set up by modern frameworks or revivalist tendencies. Ecological ideas here refer to embedded spatial logics that intertwine social, political, environmental and material ecologies.