Vaissnavi Shukl
The world of speculative design affords us the liberty of approaching urban planning through lenses we would have conventionally disregarded as overly ambitious or impractical. Of course, one can argue that all design is speculative until we break ground. But an intentional practice of speculative design can lead one to some very thought-provoking solutions to global problems.  This was also the case with Depanshu Gola from Architecture for Dialogue, who tried addressing the problem of migrant farmers, decreasing farmlands, increasing costs of production and transportation, by proposing to convert public spaces in his hometown, Delhi, into urban farmlands. In today’s conversation, we think out loud about unused garden spaces outside malls, the function of terrace gardens and farmers as service providers.

I am Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off-Centre, a podcast where we discuss contemporary discourses that shape the built environment, but do not necessarily occupy the centrestage in our daily lives. We speak to radical designers, thinkers and change makers who are deeply engaged in redefining the way we live and interact with the world around us.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Depanshu, you’re from Delhi and you’re native to Delhi where you like born and raised in Delhi?

Depanshu Gola
Yeah, I’m born and brought up in Old Delhi to be specific. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
Wonderful so you have three decades of experience to talk about Delhi. 

Depanshu Gola
Yeah 30 years. Observations, I think.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Observations. Okay so, as a resident of Delhi tell us what you think is the relationship between the food and the city? This is like an open ended question. So we know your thesis and your work within Architecture for Dialogue was based on the design of a Mandi. I think that’s kind of like the point of genesis. Tell us what got you interested in agricultural studies from an architectural perspective?

Depanshu Gola
Yeah, okay. I’ll start with your first question which is almost like you know what is the relationship between the food and the city for me, you know, in all my experiences. I mean, first thing that you say to anybody about Delhi, so first thing that comes to your mind is street food, you know, all these cuisines.. So that’s one side of a lot about these spices and all of it. Where I also felt like, there is in this question, there is also another layer which is, we are also at the same time disconnected with our food. Which is like any other city, because in cities we are getting all  these resources but we really don’t know where are they coming from? We are quite oblivious about their production, let’s say. I am also basing it on just the food aspect right now, but yeah, that’s also how I felt and that has been my on and off feeling, then I started thinking about what to do in my thesis, then in practice. So that is the kind of layer I think, I just want to respond to. When you said what is the relationship of food and the city. I think coming to your second question, how I got interested in agricultural studies, from an architectural perspective, honestly I mean, if I can just specifically talk about my thesis. So in that I think, two things were kind of guiding me first and I think I was quite done with responding to just these mainstream briefs. I wanted… As a person I’m always curious to explore new typologies and for that I thought, you know, responding to a new brief would do that, and then I started exploring all you can do and being like a shallow  architecture student..like most I think I was quite interested in these urban farming and skyscrapers. There were these futuristic towers that people talked about. And I was like, Okay, here’s something interesting, which is about when we talk about urban farming or even these skyscrapers, how they look like or they kind of respond to Delhi as a context. So I think that was the kind of first thing I started and then got into this really long tunnel about knowing where my food is coming from, what is this whole food production chain, what is happening there and then another, which is coming from that and you have to be so make a building this can happen. And interestingly, while I was studying this food production journey, I kind of arrived at this Mandi as like the centre point where all… this is this is literally a point where producers like farmers, and consumers,us, we are kind of meeting on hub. I mean, I can not say quite literally, because a lot of people don’t even go to Mandis as well but this is almost like the first touch point for any farmers or producers in cities. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
So for whoever is not from the region and doesn’t know what a Mandi is, can you draw an audio visual picture of walking into a Mandi ?

Depanshu Gola
Oh that’s interesting. Let me try. Let me bring my shot at that. So as a formal term, it will be like a wholesale food market where basically the operations are happening…

Vaissnavi Shukl
And so by food we mean like fresh produce as it is just like fruits and vegetables…

Depanshu Gola
In this case, mostly fruits and vegetables. So, in this case, the majorly these are like operations that are happening at a bigger scale, or like a wholesale, when we say. And so in that, I mean, it’s very much logistic like it’s a logistics operation, and it doesn’t cater much to public as such. So that’s what a Mandi is. When you go into a Mandi, it’s like full chaos and it’s kind of like, you’ll be like, okay, so much is happening so much of food and things are getting packed, things are getting moved from this point to another point. There are these auction areas where people would do these auctions of their products. There are these different agents like these commission agents, so there is like a big operation. So I think people who are listening to this I would just urge them if they can find Mandi or like a wholesale, food and vegetable market within their place, have a visit over a weekend. Take your friends along you. You’ll have an amazing time. And it’s also a good experience to just literally know where your food is coming from. Almost like a first step when you start to look at that from a city-dwellers perspective. So I mean, so yeah, like getting back to the main thing like in my thesis. So taking Mandi as a typology the most intent for that thesis was that okay, Mandi is from a design perspective that in this whole talk about urban farming, which is basically you do farming within urban areas. How will that add to it in the sense that a lot of people are already talking about urban farming, people are saying, okay, you can do terrace farming as well. But somehow people are not doing it or it’s not getting to that mass adoption level. So, as a hypothesis, that was kind of my idea that you know, what if architecture or the design can take that role and you know, all the physical infrastructure that can literally act as this knowledge hub where farmers, where consumers also coming and this is kind of, you know, start to talk about share this knowledge about farming and what can we do and you know, where this can go from that point. So that was like, literally from a building perspective. And that’s what I did and almost as a pathological interventions for that…is that… is that when you see Mandi as a building, it’s almost a very flat land almost like a factory setup, where you will see they have large roof areas that have literally vacant or nothing is happening. So as just an idea, that was a proposed thing that what if you kind of create that into like a large farming area within Mandi, and this is again not really saying that you know, that can really cater to a good amount of people like that food production, but it is almost on the lines of that how they will kind of act as that knowledge hub. Where you know, you can have like, different functions like whether you can have like an Organic Cafe, or they can be these weekend festivals or like a farmers market where you’re literally engaging with the food as a culinary experience. So yeah, I think that was the kind of thing that I tried to do in my thesis.

Vaissnavi Shukl
So that’s kind of like the origin story or the moment of genesis which actually propelled you into like a whole different inquiry. So you, you found an experimental research base today called Architecture for Dialogue with your partner or…

Depanshu Gola
We are like college buddies, like we were talking about this… how we have taken, it’s almost been like, what, 11 years now together. Of working together.

Vaissnavi Shukl
You guys take up some day nice projects and some very interesting inquiries within broadly art, design, planning. I mean, you… you work across spectrums, right? I want to talk about this one particular speculative design project that you had, which is called ‘Delhi Agro-city 2050’. So you’re imagining what the city where you’ve grown up and you belong from would look like what to change, it’s…it’s mode and methods of existence. So, couple of points considering the rise in population and the mass migration to urban areas, you are kind of proposing or hypothesising that cities do have the potential to be agricultural centres like centres for agricultural production, which is radical in the sense that most people seem to be gravitating towards an urban life or city life to get away from what they’re doing back in their native lands. Right? So the way migration in India usually works is that a lot of migrant workers in the city have two lives, right, two modes of earning livelihood, one is during normal months of the year or normal as in the times when they’re not harvesting back home. They work as migrant workers in the city, whether it’s in construction, whether it’s in factory, whether it’s production, around March, early spring, when it is time for sowing the seeds, they go back. They plant the seeds, come back to the city and post once around monsoon when it’s time to harvest. They actually go back and harvest stuff, right? So it’s this constant influx of people coming to the city and then going back, but what you’re saying is we can move whatever they’re doing back home in the rural areas, to the city itself. So in a way it’s kind of challenging the whole idea of migration like to its very core. Now I don’t want to dig into it too much because I know it’s like a speculative design proposal. We’re not like writing a manifesto where you’ve thought about all the moving parts, but it is radical in the sense that you’re taking away one large part of life and moving into the one place where they are going to escape from, you know, whatever drawbacks that that particular life has. And a lot of people also seem to be gravitating towards newer farms…new…new ways of farming, right? So there’s even a place like Ahmedabad, a huge huge boom in hydroponics. There are a lot of enthusiasts who’ve taken up large shed space. A lot of people even do it in the basements of their houses or buildings and set up hydroponic farms, you know, farm to table but like not farm as you would imagine when you were younger, farming without soil. And this eliminates the need for soil but also like by extension, eliminates the need for land that you would like plough and everything that goes into it. But as you think we can devise a new urban network, very mobilised land for food production. That’s my understanding of your world. But tell us

Depanshu Gola
Wow, you’re also highlighting a realistic picture that migration is there, but I think I

Vaissnavi Shukl
That’s a flaw, I’m too pragmatic and practical. I fail to dream. Ignore that if you want to,

Depanshu Gola
And that’s on one level that is totally relevant. And that’s exactly how this kind of idea about getting into this whole speculative design exercise what we did, imagining Delhi as an Agro-city in 2050 is about that. That we do understand and we are kind of in a real world we have all big pushes that as a person, because you’re, you can be informed but like at that level, where you can talk about and that’s where I think this this kind of speculation starts to make sense, when it comes to whatever these problems are. So I think in that project, as I was describing, that you know, okay, these days, it was all about Mandi as a typology, what you could do in it, that was always like, you know, okay, this is a starting point, you don’t know where this can go. This was based on this hypothesis, okay, everybody will do urban farming. But in this case, so two questions that were started with… was kind of like this, who will grow our food? And in the context or in the present context, you can almost like every year, day, week or month that you know, this is happening, with this farmer or with these farmer groups. We have seen this big Farmers’ Protest and we constantly see this struggle that how farmers are struggling with their food production and this everything is kind of upon them, and then it gets to pictures like not getting good deals for the food. Or the whole thing about, you know, they have to safeguard against all these pesticides, chemicals and all this so they have to safeguard from these organisms. So in that regard, that was first and then the second was that the climate change or the climate emergency is also real and almost like again, like maybe in hypothesis, but conventional farming might not work in the coming future. So we need all these new kinds of innovation farming, so kind of basing in that we almost realised that you know, we need to think about it more from the perspective of…perspective of an ecosystem, if I can loosely say so. And what does? That means that you know, even before you getting down to that what you can do in these infrastructural changes, you need to understand what’s happening at the core. And that’s where we realise this talk of urban farming, a lot of people do, kind of project that as one of the solution that the city can enjoy, but we don’t really ask them that will do urban farming. Even if they are doing it as a hobby, okay, maybe you have some planters in your balcony, but there is no serious thought to it. And that is not about being sustainable, but these are almost like these other examples, or another narrative to this is that, first of all, we need a huge kind of innovation in the farming industry. And leaving farmers out from that talk is kind of I feel it’s maybe not good to have, like you have to be farmers because we are also seeing that farmers, the lack of you know, these kind of economical benefits, more of them are now opting out, or they will see that, you know, my kids won’t do farming because it’s really not worth and so in that way we are also losing that whole lot of wisdom, and whole lot of knowledge about how you grow your food. That’s where we felt that okay, like even in just kind of… keeping these two major actors as one would be this farmers and one would be this consumers, what if they cohabit and then how would that start to change the picture itself. And in that regard, one thing is that you kind of place them together and that you have to talk a lot about policy interventions, technology, the environmental side and what infrastructural inputs can happen. But once that starts to make some sense and that also, in our process, we always say that, you know, it’s like an iterative process, you really cannot judge where you can arrive at it but it’s almost the energy that lies in that sense of collaboration. And I was reading this interesting article, just a little offshoot, but  what they were talking about was how the housing crisis is also impacting innovation. And I was like, okay, that’s interesting, and basically the genesis was that this proximity of these two different people from different disciplines creates a lot more than if they are placed in different cities or cities. And that kind of also stayed with me like we never thought of it like that and that’s keeping them together makes sense. And this has to make business sense as well. Why farmers as you know, hold this thing about that okay, so, in the city, you have a real, high real estate value.

Vaissnavi Shukl
That’s what I was actually getting at because I do want to focus exclusively on the role of farmers in this, unlike this one stranding idea of terrace farming in architecture school. It’s like a whole, like era, you know, you talk about any housing project within the city and even the genders would show these like green little patches. There’s a whole movement you know, when terraces started becoming green, first ever roof garden because Corbusier is like a Five Points of Architecture, gotta have a roof garden. So we started with a garden and then somebody had a thought of, you know, what if this garden becomes a farm, like, suddenly all architecture school students are assuming that residents would grow their own food, which problematically assumes that everybody is interested in farming. It’s not a case because it is an intensive activity, right, like farming, farming needs, needs, time and effort and work and skills, of course, but your project integrates farmers into the process of production. How do you think this would work? Are we by extension of course, within the bubble of speculative design projects? Are we saying that farmers will continue doing what they do in villages, but now in cities, or are we preventing farmers from switching to other modes of livelihoods and if they saying that they’ll now live in the cities and then work in this, these are like farmer the cities, what happens to all those farmlands back home? Because those are untended? Right?

Depanshu Gola
Yeah, I think you’re highlighting a really important question as well here and to respond to that, I would just take a step back and I would like to respond to that kind of intent, start to address these issues. So when we sort of vision this and this is also an important part about visioning of what is your intent. So in this case, we are not saying that, okay, so cities we will have all the farmers and then they will also become self-sustainable. It’s almost like an iterative process. Once it starts to happen, it’s gonna find its own kind of equilibrium. Cities cannot consume all farms. That cannot happen. That can be but it’s also a thinking that Delhi being just an example or in this case, as an example, but we also have upcoming cities as well. So it really talks about that, you know, placing farming as also part of a city fabric. And then start to explore where this can go and again like this, this depends a lot on those collaborations and all these prototyping as well.

Vaissnavi Shukl
That’s a very interesting point, yeah. 

Depanshu Gola
So I mean, that’s where I think this question will start to make sense again, like, you know, people were saying, okay, city’s going to become self-sufficient. In terms of their food or whatever. I personally don’t think that’s the case. We like to look at the numbers. In that regard, I think it’s really important to understand why this vision in the first place. It’s actually about first of all, giving farmers that opportunity to get into maybe innovations in the business side of things as well.. Like, you know, maybe connecting with consumers directly, that can also pave way for new models. Another thing that just, you know, almost like imagining that as a seed. We also proposed how farming can be looked at as a service, almost how we see as a mali in our house. This can also be a case where, okay, I’ll just paint a picture of a gated community or society. You have a bunch of houses and they all get together. And let’s just say okay, there is a policy where everybody’s kind of incentivized to have a certain amount of farming spaces within their houses or backyards or now, obviously, we don’t have enough time to get to farming. But you know, you have a space. So what you do is you kind of employ farmers as a service provider, they would come to…

Vaissnavi Shukl
Like a sass tool in technology, you know, it’s like farming as a service.

Depanshu Gola
Yeah. So they will take care of those farming production and maybe one… one household is growing, another household is just growing carrots. Another household is making tomatoes. Or another household is making just potatoes. And then as a society, they all come together and they say you can also do this almost like a barter system. In this future we’re going to use this major hyper blockchain…

Vaissnavi Shukl
Or even like a cooperative system, right? Whatever gets produced goes into this co-op, and from the co-op, people take what they want for use and you pool your resources together.

Depanshu Gola
And that’s basically a picture as well, that farmers can, they can literally take out that pressure of managing land, pooling resources, that as a consumer you are providing and farmer is this coming with their skills. That might be a win-win situation. Again, not saying that that’s okay. That society will become self-sufficient. But it will be a start point where as an individual, you have a better connection with food that you’re eating. This personally, I believe that you should really know what sources you’re using coming from because we tend to take things for granted when we have all these facilities present in a city. So yeah, that was kind of my point is like, make sense, how about we prototype something like this. So that’s where we are at, you know, we have like all these kinds of speculation and yeah, one day we would like to prototype such.

Vaissnavi Shukl
But because you’re speaking of prototyping, there’s this other tangent that I was thinking of, okay, we did this speculator design, because increasingly as the population rises. And apparently one of the recent studies that we’ve… we’ve now peaked in terms of population… now will either plateau or decline. We are facing an increasing lack of public spaces right? The cities are becoming better or they’re just growing really like Ahmedabad on the outside and because of migration, there’s a lot of people coming with equal amounts of resources that are being consumed. So let alone have, like, urban farmlands and neighbourhoods with, you know, skyrocketing real estate prices, you know, one would think, why don’t I just build something here and rent it out? Because then I get money. Would the conversion of existing public into farmlets contribute to scarcity in some sense? I’ll tell you why, very interesting. Yesterday, once our  class called over, we ran into a friend who’s studying urban planning, and he works in the social service sector. I had this other friend from Delhi who was just talking about the farming shepherding community and there are a lot of gurjas in Delhi like the outskirts of Delhi who used to own a lot of tabelas. So, buffaloes, cows for dairy. What happened has been with the new town plans that were, you know, put into action is that and kind of caught and that land kind of enveloped within the city and suddenly this person realised, “Why should I give this prime real estate to my buffaloes when I can actually get cheaper land outside, move my buffaloes outside and these cowsheds buffalo sheds and tabela into rental units for migrant workers.” Okay, this is verbatim, this is what he found in his research. And so what they did is they converted those cow sheds and Buffalo sheds literally like you know how they pack like horses is like, a tabela here then you have like a column then you have another in those places where they had columns or whatever is like in the shed, they put partitions. And then you had these rooms where each room would be sublet to four or six migrant workers and all of those workers would be 4000-5000 rupees in rent. And it’s like this is not the kind of money I would have made if I was selling milk here because the kind of resources you put in here to feed the buffaloes, you have to vaccinate them. You should bla bla bla bla bla…you have to pasteurise the milk, if you’re going to give it to like co-op. And so apparently that’s a trend that’s happening in the periphery, like peri-urban areas of Delhi is, I’m just saying, I’m provoking you, how do you think real estate would work in that sense? It’s like you have a cat and stick thing. It’s like you know if I like a bigger cat dangling here I can just use it and get more money, why would I take all this hassle.

Depanshu Gola
No, that’s a valid one actually, and then you’re what you’re also touching upon is an important aspect, that Delhi and cities, they’re not always all these buildings and roads, and every infrastructure and you can’t see much open spaces or these farmlands. And even in Delhi you have these peri-urban areas, where still people are doing these farmings on their land, again rightly said as a case that when the certain developments are happening, there is an increase in that land price and to tend to sell for whatever development, shopping malls, housing, whatever. So I think in this case, what we are kind of imagining is something also within those city centres where you can see that there are no enough spaces, where, you know, already have allocated these roads to these parks, all these dead spaces as well, a disputed property or what not. And also buildings that are still abiding by these bylaws so for example in Old Delhi, you can’t make a house more than four storeys. So you still have access to terrace. And then again, you also touched upon… a good thing about, you know, okay, what about these public spaces? And in that sense, I see that point and though I would like to highlight that in the Indian context, our understanding of a public space is actually all these chowks, and gallis. They make our kind of public spaces. As contradictory to those buildings…

Vaissnavi Shukl
I would actually say now like the contemporary public space is actually probably a mall because of you know how cities have grown and the means and methods of transportation has changed. You’re not really like walking in the city anymore, like our cities are not as walkable if you live in a large city like Delhi, Ahmedabad, Mumbai. In Ahmedabad usually people choose to drive their own vehicles but in Mumbai, you take the local train like your public space that you encounter in your daily life is most likely a railway station you know. In Delhi, unless you live in, you’re lucky to be living in Old Delhi, hopefully you have your chowks and your chowrahas and everything. But I mean, imagine you’re living either in Noida or Gurugram, and you’re like, going and like commuting elsewhere or if you live in Delhi and you’re going to Gurugram like DLF whatever cyber city to work, your public space is most likely a mall or a food court. That’s my reading.

Depanshu Gola
Yeah, I think in terms of housing typology, it’s also something coming to that as the second case, which is you know, you see this example of Noida or Gurugram or any other part of the city which has, you know, sky…skyscrapers in the sense they, you know, these high rise housing societies. Again, you know, coming back to certain bylaws, they can still make those towers, but then they also have to allocate some kind of open space to that and then their response as a design in that we would like okay, we are gonna make like a green park or a green land, where the cost of maintenance is so high, nobody can step on that grass.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And nobody does right? Because cities are getting hotter. I mean, imagine Delhi or if there was a key, like a fancy building with like this patch of grass, very well manicured grass lawn. Who’s going to sit there and have lunch? You’re probably get a heatstroke if you want to go and have lunch there?

Depanshu Gola
How about we find a new normal about all these useless green spaces that you also put in a dent in your pocket to maintain and thus who are not letting people to actually access those places. Can they maybe… you gave a certain part of that land to farming? Does that make sense? I can hardly comment on that, what would be the proportion and this is where, series of prototyping or doing certain interventions with time, can give better clues to that. But this is where I am getting at, we have a lot of space, even when we talk about…Like at least in the context of Delhi, I can’t comment on Ahmedabad or Mumbai kind of a place. But as a city, in Delhi there is a lot of space, and we are yet to define how we use that. And that’s where this picture is kind of coming in. 

Vaissnavi Shukl
But that’s also probably something you guys can prototype. It’s just like go to Cyber City and being like you know, “This is all this space that nobody uses. Why don’t you produce something in it?” I’ll take credit for that idea. So now with this wonderful speculative provocation design project that you have, what is next for you and what’s next for AFD? What are you guys up to?

Depanshu Gola
So I think at AFD we constantly talk about let’s just look at our past work, our present work, as well and where we are kind of heading to. So increasingly we are realising that, you know as a practice, as individuals, as well, we are really interested in the future of habitat. And when we say the future of habitat that means that the future of mobility, future of food, future of waste, and basically, that’s the purpose that we are kind of driven by right now and that’s where AFD is kind of heading into and since and we do understand that these are quite big problems. So really, how do you kind of get into even this thing? Can you really do something about it, like you’re talking about food production? What can you do about it? And in that regard, we would just like to say, okay, why don’t we just start small and see where this goes. That’s where our kind of approach comes in, we call it like an iterative approach to architecture, where you start with a small experiment using the stakeholders, try to test some prototypes and kind of easily get to maybe a bigger provocation and try to intervene at bigger scale and see where this goes, increasingly. And instead of saying that, you know, okay, I have this one vision. We want to take this big land piece and be like, I don’t know, like, some big project and that will fail. And so that’s not really what we’re after. And that’s where we are. Let’s start with a small experiment. So yeah, I think just to summarise, I think it’s really focused on the future of habitat and not saying that, you know, we are doing this in the future. But we really want to start now, because this is another piece where, you know, in speculative design you like so much in the future, that you think that you can’t do something in the present. And that’s where this kind of act, where, you know, “No, you can do something in the present as well. Start now.” 

Vaissnavi Shukl
Somebody once said that there could be a phone where you can touch and operate and that person, everybody thought was crazy. So here’s to the future. Thank you so much, Depanshu, this was a lot of fun.

Depanshu Gola
As I will say, this was kind of my first podcast, so yeah, I really enjoyed the conversation and thank you for inviting me.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.