Developing my thesis

Motivation

I started learning photography six years ago, as a high school student. Immediately, I found myself drawn to street portraits, capturing people in spaces they had made their own. In a market in the small village of Shantiniketan, my lens followed the artisans as they displayed their handmade novelties, a short break at the tea stall, the toils of their daily rituals. The portraits told their stories, as they shared with me over friendly conversations.

Returning to the camera years later as an architecture student in Rome, I found myself drawn to the same subjects, but now with a more intentional and architectural gaze. I paid closer attention to how people modify and inhabit the city, how informal, temporary actions help them belong, assert identity, and negotiate visibility in unfamiliar places. Photography became a way of reading urban space: a method for understanding placemaking, informality, and belonging through lived experiences.

This enduring interest in people, their daily lives, rituals, conversations and shared moments, now grounds my architectural work. I am drawn to questions of how design can facilitate collective identity, support everyday practices, and amplify community voices. I aspire for my thesis to build on this: to explore how designers can engage, empower, and meaningfully collaborate with the communities who animate the spaces we shape.

Increasingly, I see technological and data-driven tools as ways to strengthen this engagement. With a growing interest in computer science applications in architecture, particularly around public participation, I created Drawing with a Thousand People, an interactive tool that uses Google’s QuickDraw dataset to visualize how people around the world represent common objects. This project sharpened my interest in participatory, process-oriented methods as tools that reveal collective patterns, spark dialogue, and invite people into design conversations.

My early ideation for this thesis sits at the intersection of these themes: community narratives, informal spatial practices, and technologically supported engagement. This post documents the development of those ideas and outlines the directions I explored as I begin shaping the project.

Thesis Development

My thesis began with a long-standing interest in placemaking as an everyday practice. In my photography, I was drawn to the small ways people claim space through routine: work unfolding in public, objects arranged with care, conversations that turn a street edge into a social room. Over time, I began to read these actions as spatial knowledge. They shape how places are used, recognized, and carried forward through memory.

This lens became sharper as I observed immigrant neighborhoods. Even in cities where people arrive without historical roots, culture becomes visible with remarkable clarity. A few blocks can feel like a different country through storefront languages, food economies, worship spaces, street rhythms, and the public life that gathers around them. These neighborhoods made culture legible as a working system. It organizes livelihoods, social networks, and a sense of belonging.

I began studying Jackson Heights in New York alongside my own city, Kolkata, looking for parallels in how everyday economies and cultural practices shape the city from the ground up. That comparison made one condition in Kolkata especially urgent. As a post-primacy city, Kolkata has been shifting away from the industrial identity that once structured its growth. Cultural economies and dense social networks continue to carry the city’s everyday functioning.

Neighborhood markets, street vendors, para clubs, artisan communities, and festival infrastructures form a civic backbone that is both economic and social. The Durga Puja ecosystem makes this visible at city scale, linking artisan production and local supply chains to temporary construction, neighborhood organization, and collective public space.

At the same time, Kolkata is undergoing redevelopment that often feels disconnected from these cultural realities. New construction frequently follows generic real estate logics and privatized spatial models, even when the surrounding city runs on shared streets, informal workspaces, and seasonal public infrastructures. This gap risks displacing the very communities and practices that generate place, livelihood, and identity. The question for my thesis emerged here: what does it mean to modernize a city whose strength lies in cultural production and everyday social life?

This thesis asks how urban redevelopment in Kolkata can support modernization while remaining accountable to daily practices that already make the city function. It explores design strategies that treat cultural communities as active producers of urban space, and it considers participatory and data-driven tools as methods for making these practices visible, legible, and protected within planning and redevelopment decisions.

My thesis investigates how Kolkata can modernize through redevelopment strategies that strengthen cultural economies and everyday spatial practices, positioning culture as an operational urban system and a primary stakeholder in design decisions.

Why Kumortuli?

When I started looking for a case study that could hold the full weight of my thesis question, I kept returning to Durga Puja, because it is one of the clearest moments when Kolkata’s cultural identity becomes a city-scale operation. Months before the festival, the city begins to shift. Material supply chains intensify, temporary structures appear, neighborhoods mobilize resources, and public space becomes an active commons. The festival is often described through its spectacle, but what stays with me is the system underneath it: the labor, the coordination, and the everyday spaces that quietly make the event possible.

Kumartuli matters to me because it sits close to the production core of that system. It is a place where cultural economy is visible as daily work. Clay is mixed, figures are formed, painted, dried, repaired, and carried out through narrow lanes that already have their own rhythms of life. Skills are held across generations, work is seasonal and intense, and the neighborhood’s spatial practices evolve around making, storing, drying, and moving fragile forms. In Kumartuli, culture becomes something you can map: spaces of making, spaces of waiting, spaces of negotiation, and the street as an extension of the workshop.

I am also drawn to Kumartuli because it shows the friction between cultural production and urban conditions with unusual clarity. The infrastructural reality of the neighborhood shapes what is possible for artisans every day: congestion, limited space, environmental exposure, access, sanitation, safety, and the pressures of a seasonal economy. These conditions are part of how the festival is produced. They determine whose labor is protected, whose work is made difficult, and whose future in the city remains stable.

Kumartuli becomes even more relevant because it already sits within contemporary redevelopment attention, especially along the riverfront and ghat edge. The language around “restoration” and “beautification” signals that change is already being planned and narrated at an urban scale. For my thesis, this makes the locality a real test case. It is a place where modernization can arrive through public projects, tourism agendas, environmental directives, and infrastructure upgrades, and where design decisions will shape how cultural work continues to exist in the city.

I know Kumartuli is not the only site of idol-making in Kolkata. Other clusters exist, and production has spread across the city. Kumartuli still makes sense as a case study because it concentrates the relationships my thesis is trying to understand: cultural labor, public space, infrastructure, seasonal transformation, and the politics of redevelopment. It allows me to stay grounded in a specific locality while tracing a much wider urban system.

Focusing on Kumartuli, then, is not only about preserving a heritage neighborhood. It is about treating cultural production as a primary urban function and asking what redevelopment looks like when that function is taken seriously. Kumartuli gives me a site where "modernization" is necessary, where cultural economy is structurally significant, and where design can be evaluated by what it enables for daily work, community life, and the city’s identity.