Unlocking Cities
Local Insight, Global Ambition
“Mera shehar logan soon mamoor kar
Rakhya joon toon darya mein min ya Sami”
“Oh God, fill up my city with people
just as you have filled the river with fish,”
Our Work
Khidki Collective
Just as the second wave of the pandemic was hitting India, we began to convene a series of intimate conversations with academic researchers about how Hyderabad Deccan shaped their research. The conversations were named Hyderabad Deccan Gol Mez (Round Table).
The scholars who participated in these round tables built a collaborative writing project under the name of Khidki Collective. The Khidki – (window) today is many things for HUL. It is a place for reflection, intimate conversations and insights. It reminds us that places make claims on us and invite us to make claims on them.
Urban Observatory
The lab looks to the city as a place constantly in a flux, where agendas, plans and interventions align and realign. To remain in engagement with such a place we taught ourselves to create opportunities for research and advocacy, interventions, and to keep archiving the data generated from our work. Some of this work turns into special projects such as Do Din and A Place for Her. Some of it turns into sets of practices that we can only describe as art@hul and gis@hul – creative and research practices. Most of it can be convened under the name of urban observatory.
School
Creating enabling learning spaces was always high on the HUL agenda. How do you learn when your movement is so severely restricted and the classroom has virtually moved into homes distributed across the world?
Thus was born Hyderabad Urban Lab School. At the end of the first wave of the pandemic we offered our first three day online course, titled Pandemic and the City.
Since then we went on to offer three more editions of the online course and then added online and offline editions of skill training in spatial imaginations.
About the HUL Logo
The HUL logo represents the urban grid, an interconnected network of resources and opportunities that should ideally be available and accessible to everyone who stakes a claim to them. In other words the logo represents the city as a space of resource sharing and opportunity generation for everyone that is part of it.
