Scripting Spaces
Designing Between Cultures of Control and Commons
Chaitra Alankar
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Designer
Chaitra Alankar
I’m a multidisciplinary designer and architect with a fascination for the messy, unscripted ways people navigate the world. I’m drawn to work that resists perfection, design that listens more than it instructs, and reveals new meaning in the everyday. I believe the best ideas come from the edges. I’m drawn to systems that shift, spaces that evolve, and designs that make space for ambiguity, adaptation, and contradiction. I find clarity in the in-between - between disciplines, between systems, between what is and what could be.
Take a Glance
About the Project
Project Overview
Scripting Spaces is a cross-cultural design inquiry into the quiet loss of informality in the American urban public realm. It challenges the efficient, clean, safe nature of public space in American cities through the lens of informality and adaptation in urban streetscapes of developing countries. It asks what is erased when cities are designed only for order, cleanliness, and control and what might be regained if we allowed for a little mess and looseness. Drawing from the everyday street vitality of Bangalore and the structured public realm of Austin, the project uses mapping, interaction, and tactical interventions to reimagine sidewalks not as corridors of movement, but as urban participatory commons of expression, gathering, and possibility.
Goal
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Undertake a spatial and ethnographic study of Church Street (Bangalore) and South Congress Avenue (Austin) to analyze how regulatory, cultural, and spatial frameworks shape patterns of public space use, interaction, and informality.
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Investigate how experimental tactical interventions can act as probes to reveal latent behavioral patterns, social dynamics, desires of urban dwellers and affordances within urban public spaces.
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Design and implement a series of public space experiments - both analog and interactive - to assess how subtle spatial disruptions can challenge normative behavioral patterns and prompt public reflection.
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Contribute to emerging discourses on urban informality, spatial justice, and participatory urbanism by proposing a framework for reclaiming and reimagining everyday streetscapes as dynamic, democratic commons.
Outcome
Through site-specific mapping, data visualization, observational research, and public space interventions, this design-led inquiry visualizes the contrasts between cultures of control and cultures of commons. It investigates the physical and social aspects that contribute to the creation of what Frank and Stevens call loose spaces. Informed by these case studies and data visualization. The work culminated in a set of spatial provocations - both analog and digital - that speculate on more expressive urban futures. It also advocates for interaction and art-based interventions to prompt a reimagining of public space potential in the American public realm. The final outcome is not a solution to urban rigidity, but a question posed to its inhabitants: what if your public space invited you to stay, speak, play, and participate?
External Resources
Links to your thesis/presentation……
Featured Items
Ethnographic Spatial Mapping
Layered visual mappings translate observed public behaviors into spatial insight, revealing the tension between planned and lived urban use through visuals.
Tactical and Interactive Urban Interventions
Analog and speculative media-based experiments probe how everyday interactions can challenge spatial norms and suggest new urban possibilities.
Cross-Cultural Urban Design Inquiry
Draws on urban public realm in the Global South and North to challenge dominant planning paradigms and advocate for more inclusive,resilient and adaptive urban futures.
Design as Spatial Critique and Speculation
Uses design-led research to critique overregulated public space and speculate on inclusive, participatory futures through the lens of looseness in urban space.
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Prototype
01. Rualdih!
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02. Chin National Flag
03. Chin-language Planner
04. Chin Printed Textiles
05. Tappi le Lungthu Coasters
What Took Me Here
Process
Background Research
This project began with a personal contradiction - between the over-regulated streetscapes of the U.S. and the layered, improvisational vitality of India. Growing up between these two contexts, I witnessed radically different relationships to public space. In India, streets were messy, spontaneous, and deeply human - sites of livelihood, ritual and expression. In the U.S., they were clean, safe, and strangely hollow - governed by unsaid rules of where to walk, how to behave, and when to leave. Over time, I realized: these weren’t just different designs, but imagined, inhabited, and regulated differently.
In developing nations, informality shapes inclusive, adaptable public realms - yet it’s often seen as a flaw in developed nations. As developing nations rapidly urbanize under pressure to emulate Western ideals, it risks losing the very vibrancy that defines its streets. Meanwhile, American cities struggle to rekindle the street life they've erased through overregulation and commodification. Rather than idealizing one model over another, this work positions looseness not as a lack of design, but as a design value in itself. What can we learn from the looseness of one context to humanize the rigidity of another?
The research draws on Loose Space (Franck & Stevens), Lefebvre’s Production of Space, and Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi et al.), reframing how space is appropriated, symbolized, and experienced. Lynch and Gehl further inform the role of legibility, proximity, and sensory complexity in shaping everyday urban life.
This thesis challenges the one-way flow of urban design ideals. It asks: What if the “mess” is the method? What if looseness is not a flaw, but a form of public life worth learning from? Drawing from lived experience and urban theory, this work explores an approach that values agency, participation, and shared ownership in shaping the city.
People, Place and Interaction
To understand how people interact with public space, I conducted field-based observational studies and real-time behavioral mapping. Using layered diagrams, I documented the physical features, permitted uses, and actual uses of Church Street (Bangalore) and South Congress Avenue (Austin). These maps revealed patterns of social behavior, pedestrian flow, and spatial appropriation - what was used, ignored, adapted, or avoided. To complement this, I designed low-tech and high-tech public interventions that invited participation, interruption, and reflection. These experiments acted as live feedback tools, offering insight into how urban dwellers react to loosened space and how design might prompt different behaviors. The city itself became both subject and co-creator in this interactive research process.
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Experimenting
Making was iterative, experimental, and rooted in site-specific context. I developed a series of public space interventions - some analog, others digitally augmented - each designed to test how urban environments might be loosened and how subtle provocations could prompt new behaviors. While digital prototypes were developed to test interactive, art-based installations, the implemented interventions focused on low-tech analog experiments with materials like cones, lines, textures, art, and objects that created tactile prompts in everyday space. Each experiment evolved in response to real-time user behavior, adapting its form and placement based on how people engaged - or didn’t. The making wasn’t to solve, but to provoke: small disruptions that revealed larger patterns of social conformity, curiosity, resistance, and desire. Would people follow, deviate, participate, or pass by? Every reaction - hesitation, play, avoidance, conversation - was carefully observed and documented. Together, these experiments and mappings became not just a method for studying public space, but a framework for designing with the social, not just for it.
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What's Next
Conclusion
Response and Learning
Subtle interventions sparked revealing behaviors. Many pedestrians adjusted their paths without question, while others paused, curious but cautious. Some asked, “Are we allowed to walk on this?” - a question that revealed how deeply regulation shapes public behavior. Yet, in contrast, I also observed glimpses of resistance and desire for shared use: informal vendors quietly setting up from the backs of cars, pedestrians jumping a crosswalk, small groups lingering sitting on a ledge. These moments signaled a quiet longing for public space where everyday acts weren’t seen as obstructions or unwanted, but simply as part of the fabric of urban life.
Future
This thesis positions tactical and interactive interventions as tools for inquiry - design processes that uncover how people perceive, navigate, and claim space. Looking ahead, the work will explore interactive media as a catalyst for spatial reimagination, using cross-cultural connections to spark new modes of engagement with the urban public realm. Through collaborations with placemaking organizations, urban design institutions, and research platforms, the next phase involves implementing and testing larger-scale, site-specific public experiments and interactive installations. These interventions are not just meant to activate space, but to provoke dialogue, invite agency, and foster shared ownership - challenging cities to rethink how they design for more inclusive, participatory commons.