As cities evolve, old city fabric transitions into new ones, and land is acquired and divided amongst the government and citizens. In this evolution process, a patch of vacant land can come into existence as a palimpsest of different buildings coming up over time and finally becoming devoid of use, ending up barricaded with tall walls. With further growth of the city, these lands become contested spaces for insurgent uses, yet those activities are not recognized and hidden away from people because of these walls. These lands may be publically or privately owned but tend to suffer from the same fate because of the barriers.

 

Thus, walls define the ‘publicness’ of a place. Gardens and parks being one of the most important open space ecologically and a public space for the people to gather just to socialise without necessarily spending money on commercial aspects (like going to malls or restaurants specifically) is quite often also an underutilised space since it gets hidden away behind the walls and accessible to only a few. Imagine having such good public infrastructure provided by the government only to be hidden away and underutilized because of the walls! A similar observation can be made in privately owned lands, which have been vacant for such a long time that they start being utilized temporarily on a daily basis but have continued to strive over a period of time long enough to have established its permanence in that space. These activities can often be seen on the edge of the dead walls of the vacant plots and have become a necessary part of the lives of the people around. Could some programs be thought of in these spaces which could establish public-private or private-private partnerships of sorts for using these vacant spaces in the best way possible catering to multiple stakeholders?

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Since walls define the publicness of such lands, there is thus a need to reimagine them to not just serve as an exterior edge and an enclosure but utilizing its potential of two edges, accommodating the activities in it and acting as the transition space required for a flow of movement instead of abrupt edges.