Symbiotic Cities · Project
SHEHERNAMU
શહેરનામું
The city’s ledger: a civic city-making series
Project Brief
Shehernamu is Multopia’s series of public evenings on how Ahmedabad is made, and for whom. Each edition takes one real city problem and seats a room of strangers as parts of the city: a tree, a street vendor, an engineer, a builder, a child not yet born. Together they walk down through the layers of the problem and climb back up with a first move. Every edition leaves two things behind: a Ledger of what the room made, and a companion paper on how the system around the problem actually works.
Causal Layered Analysis
Someone Else’s Seat
Leverage Points
Project Overview
Cities are decided in rooms most residents never enter: budget meetings, planning committees, the approval for a road widening. Shehernamu is a small, regular room of our own, where residents practise reading the city as a system and speaking for the parts of it that rarely get a say. It sits within Symbiotic Cities because its questions are ecological and civic at once: what would it take for Ahmedabad to live with its trees, its heat and its people, rather than at their expense?