City Shapers Collective 1.0
Date: 7th December, 2024
As part of the launch and opening weekend of the BLR Design Centre, we hosted the first edition of the City Shapers Collective — a start of a community of practitioners and researchers working on the city.
The City Shapers Collective is a quarterly panel hosted by Mod Foundation featuring people and practices which shape the city. The goal is to encourage conversation between ways of seeing and doing within the city. Through this we hope to develop a community of thinkers and practitioners working in the city, leading to new ideas and collaborations.
Conceived as a platform for shared inquiry and collective action, the City Shapers Collective seeks to nurture a community of people, institutions, and entrepreneurs working on the city in different ways — bringing out different aspects of our lived experiences. It imagines a network where design becomes a means to listen, connect, and act.
City Shapers Collective 1.0 marked the beginning of this conversation — one that moves beyond dialogue toward collaboration and tangible impact. It brought together practices that approach urban change through diverse lenses — from material and craft to technology, ecology, and culture — yet share a commitment to building more human, inclusive, and responsive environments.
Sridevi Changali and Rosie Paul of Masons Ink reflected on how craft, materiality, and the local vernacular can become pathways to sustainability, grounding the city’s future in its tactile traditions.
Dhiraj Chilakapaty of Venkataramanan Associates spoke of the role of architecture in shaping urban transformation, emphasizing the integration of technology, ecology, and culture in reimagining large-scale projects.Sandra George of Studio Sorted shared perspectives on design as a catalyst for community engagement, social change, and cultural expression.
Anirudh G of Fields of View introduced innovative methods of gamifying decision-making, rethinking how citizens can participate in shaping urban processes and policy.
Together, these voices illustrated the spirit of the City Shapers Collective — not as a single vision, but as a growing community of practitioners invested in shaping cities that are both rooted and forward-looking.
