Centre for Contemporary Urbanism recently organized an interactive workshop with 40 students of Shikhar Girls’ School in Okhla (mainly in the age group of 13-15 years, with a few older ones, who are now moms, and have taken the brave step to resume their education). This workshop, titled ‘KNOW YOUR CITY to LOVE YOUR CITY’, was the first among many planned by CCU to take forward its objective to enhance people’s knowledge about their cities and neighbourhoods.
We had three levels of interactive conversations – (i) about the city of Delhi; (ii) about their neighbourhood (Okhla) and; (iii) about their experience and perception of their neighbourhood. Two important lessons from the workshop were that residents sometimes know very little about their neighbourhoods, and that any study of a place or neighbourhood by outsiders would be inadequate without the perception of the residents.
The participants were surprised to know about Okhla’s rich natural and cultural heritage. What was most exciting for them was learning to read maps on their own – finding their way from home to school, identifying important landmarks and nodes and marking favourite spots and those areas which they felt were unsafe due to heavy traffic and bad roads or eve-teasing. In another session the participants were divided in groups to discuss issues which affect their household directly and are most pertinent to their area – congestion, solid waste, and erratic water supply were the main issues that came up.
We also had fun sessions of quizzes and games to understand the importance of collective action and team spirit – these the girls plays with enthusiasm and won with flying colours!! The workshop was an immense success due to our wonderful participants as well as team CCU comprising of Kanak Tiwari, Zeeshan Ibrar, Yusra Gul, Sobia Ahasan and Gautam Agarwal