This paper describes the framework of an investigation into the spread of contemporary, conventional, American-style real estate development in India. The project visually examines the social life of a small urban plaza in New Delhi. Ongoing fieldwork, which began in 2012 and is currently and continually in-progress, is an effort to produce meaningful engagement with this specific urban environment by utilizing an alternative method of inquiry; a visual method that consists of participatory 1) observing; 2) commenting; and 3) deliberating performed by the plaza’s user population and not only by the researchers.
Using visual methods of documentation maintains the integrity of the reality for the user population while providing a certificate of presence for the researchers not only useful, but also verifiable. When examining the design incongruities being imposed upon the users of this urban plaza, the research asks, “How do things look?” and, “What do the people who occupy this space see?” and, “What do they think about what they see?” The concept of the inquiry is to consider what is the larger context that local participants place themselves in whilst utilizing this particular urban space in order to discover the impacts on the local population’s traditional and habitual social patterns and attitudes specific to this urban area. The plan proposes to uncover and clarify – from the users perspective – how the culture is restructured by the imposition of American-style real estate development.
About the presenterSuzanne Frasier
Suzanne Frasier is an Associate Professor at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning, located in Baltimore, Maryland. She is a licensed and registered architect and certified interior designer in the USA with over 20 years of professional experience in the design and construction industry prior to becoming a full-time academic. Frasier has held faculty positions at The New York School of Interior Design and the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York City. She is the author of numerous theoretical and applied papers on architecture and design pedagogy and sustainable consumption in urban developments. Frasier studied architecture at the City College of New York where she also earned her Master of Urban Planning degree.
Suzanne has just returned from living in India for one year where she was a 2012-2013 Fulbright-Nehru Teaching and Research Fellow affiliated with the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. Suzanne’s pedagogical and research work focused on contemporary urban development in New Delhi. She is currently filming a documentary of the urban social dynamics at the Janak Puri District Center Plaza in west Delhi based on William H. Whyte’s groundbreaking film, The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. In addition, she is curating an exhibit sponsored by the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, entitled Nehru: Innovation In Indian Space Making, which reviews postcolonial Indian forms of interior space-making via an examination of the significant design decisions made by Jawaharlal Nehru during his leadership; the exhibit is to be held in 2014, the 125th anniversary of the Nehru’s birth.