for low income groups. This signals that this is not for you and I am pretty sure that 50% of Banga- lore does not know what is UB City and what this plaza is. That is a very interesting phenomena and it is very sad because they have a huge potential to design public spaces, to reinvent public spaces with a high level of quality for middle income and high income group but also with acces- sibility for low income groups.

NG: UB City also proves against the earlier point you (Akhila) made that we are not used to public spaces in the same way that historic public spaces behave. We can relate to street spaces in that way if we had them.

TN: Commercial Street is terrible but there are a lot of people there.

AS: The project that we are doing, Play, it is a sports area, it is very hilarious, it is an outdoor sports area that is 3 and half acres and most of it is outdoors. It is a paid park. Somebody walks in and they cannot imagine for the life of them, why anyone has built a park in a private space. We have to convince them that it is not charity, that we expect them to pay. They do pay, sometimes INR 8000 per person to spend the whole day. They compare the space to the apartment next door and they cannot understand how this is valuable for the land price. They assume Play to be a public space though we take money from them.

NG: How will you sustain this belief. It is different to have an idea of a public space, but to create the collective memory associated with a public space is a different ball game. That is a different form of choreography, you are not telling them what they should do there but you are creating enough situations for everyone to feel very comfortable to be there. How would you inculcate a culture and a counter culture in a space like Play?

AS: You have to simply let the place be. We have skate boarders who come and stay there all night. They do not leave even when we tell them to leave.

TN: Switch off the lights!

AS: They will skate with torches. They are crazy. The next day we came back and all our walls were graffitied. It was hilarious – we felt offended initially thinking that why did they not think to ask us but we thrive on them as well, and we realised that we have to let them be and if they do something that is really nasty than we will figure how to deal with it. What helped is that we did not have a boundary wall – it was very simple, people just walked in. We still don’t have a bound- ary wall.

TN: The example of play is a big failure of the lack of investment of the government in this sort of activity. When we see Cubbon Park today we could imagine to put the equipment of play in that park.

AS: Or Kanteerva Stadium

TN: There could be a company running this equipment. At least people would have a reason to go into Cubbon park. Today there is no reason to go to Cubbon Park. This is to me, is a fine exam- ple of what could be the collaboration between the public authorities and private investors, in a smarter way. I cannot go everyday to Play.