The moving city

The Kinetic City, an exhibition currently on display at The British School at Rome, presents a description of India's urban condition and also the basis for a new urban theory. The exhibition marks the end of the institution's exploration on India and its alternative forms of urbanism, the Marina Engel-curated Urban landscape — Indian Case Studies cycle. In The Kinetic City, urban planner, professor and RMA principal Rahul Mehrotra examines the urban condition in India with a view to re-discussing the way architectural design and urban planning operate in the city. His argument is based on the observation that today's Indian cities are seeing the co-existence of two different realities, which occupy the same physical space: the permanent and material "Static City" and the constantly moving and changing "Kinetic City".

Mehrotra asks us to stop looking separately at these two entities as a contrast between formal and informal environments. Instead, he proposes a consideration of a new production feature of the city itself, in which the challenge posed is how to turn this stratification of dynamics into a design tool.

The "Kinetic City" is temporary in nature, constantly changing and regenerating itself. It is a dynamic way of appropriating space, a molecular form of urbanisation that is constituted and developed by relating to the spaces, systems and infrastructures of the "Static City".

At The British School at Rome, the exhibition unfolds in three different phases. The entrance hall contains a long theoretical text by Mehrotra, introducing the Kinetic City. The corridor leading to the exhibition room plunges visitors into the character and complexity of the Indian urban universe via a wall lined with photographs and a decoration of threads and lights hanging from the ceiling. Finally, the exhibition room explores the impalpable condition of the city by narrating some of Mumbai's stories, as if drawing samples from the immaterial city's endless manifestations. The research project develops via the narration of six stories and a small glossary of terms that define the "Kinetic City": transaction, networks, housing, assembly, instability and spectacle.

"Assembly", for instance, is the story of a cricket pitch that is constantly transformed over the space of one day, combining the tradition of the British sport with a local marriage ceremony; and "Networks" illustrates the meal-delivery system that exploits the railway network to deliver meals to workers, cooked by their own families.

Mehrotra suggests we take a fresh look at the link between local and global — localising global programmes and globalising local programmes — and believes that the spectacle of the city is no longer produced by its architecture but by its events. Matteo Costanzo

Through 26 February 2013
The Kinetic City
The British School at Rome
Via Gramsci 61, Rome